Music of the night: Steven Blier looks at the staggering challenges and bewitching appeal of Mozart's Queen of the Night.

Publication: Opera News

Publication Date: 01-APR-05

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I came under the power of the Queen of the Night as an eleven-year old. When first I heard "O zittre nicht," ending with that amazing series of scales and arpeggios, I fell in love with opera--bewitched, like Tamino.

Singing that role has to be one of the more bizarre jobs in all of opera. It's a short role-- two arias and a brief ensemble, with one dialogue scene. You begin with "O zittre nicht," which has a recitative and adagio that sit in about the same middle range as the Countess in Le Nozze di Figaro, then swings into an allegro marziale with a series of increasingly difficult coloratura licks, ending with a staccato ascent to a high F. When you're finished, you go backstage for about ninety minutes and, in Beverly Sills's words, "address 250 Christmas cards," only to come out in Act II and sing "Der Holle Rache," one of the most ferocious rage arias in the opera canon. In the middle of this three-minute piece is the famous passage with the four exposed high Fs; after that, you have to sing a wicked set of triplets before launching into a longer variant of that treacherous high passage a third lower. You blast out a high B-flat at the end and hope for the best. But don't get out of your costume yet; there's still a little quintet in which you get to do your best impression of the melting witch.

There are lots of ways to be successful in this music, and lots of ways to fall on your face, but there is one nonnegotiable item in the Queen of the Night's job description: you have to nail those four staccato high Fs--a sum total of about three seconds of singing--or it doesn't much matter what else comes out of your mouth.

Because the demands of this role are so specific and so bizarre, and because Zauberflote is done so frequently, anyone who is brave enough to sing it will probably get a crack at it--as long as the presenters have confidence that those three seconds' worth of staccato high Fs are going to materialize. The role has attracted all kinds of interpreters--from the elegant, aloof Lucia Popp, who gave perhaps...

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