馃惁 Where in the World is Papageno
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Not quite three minutes of music, and a career can hinge on them. Der H枚lle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen, the Queen of the Night's second aria, strikes in the middle of Act Two of Die Zauberfl枚te like a bolt of lightning: D minor, driving strings, a mother pressing a dagger into her daughter's hand and demanding a murder. Sopranos call it many things. Almost none of them call it comfortable.
The notes explain part of the terror. The aria climbs four times to F6, the F above high C, at the outer edge of the soprano voice, and it gets there not through one sustained cry but through chains of staccato coloratura, every note attacked separately, in strict tempo, with an orchestra that refuses to wait. Precision is only half the assignment. The music must also sound like rage, so the singer needs the accuracy of a flute and the temperament of an avenging queen in the same breath. Sing it cleanly but coldly and it turns into a circus act. Sing it wildly and let the pitch smear, and every ear in the house notices. There is nowhere to hide and no time to recover.
Mozart knew exactly whose throat he was writing for. Josepha Hofer, the first Queen at the Theater auf der Wieden in 1791, was his sister-in-law, the eldest sister of his wife Constanze, and her freakish upper register was famous in Vienna. Both of the Queen's arias are built around it. Hofer kept the role for roughly a decade, which means the hardest aria in opera began as a family affair.
Every generation since has produced a handful of sopranos who make it sound possible. Lucia Popp, on Klemperer's 1964 recording, sings it with an almost eerie cleanness, ice over fire. Cristina Deutekom gave it a strange, flickering brilliance for Solti. Edda Moser, recording with the Bavarian State Opera under Wolfgang Sawallisch, produced staccatos that snap like sparks. Diana Damrau, in her Covent Garden performances, turned the aria into genuine theater, acting the fury as vividly as she sang it.
Moser's version had one more journey ahead of it. In 1977 NASA placed her recording on the Voyager Golden Record, the gold-plated disc of earthly sounds and music carried by the two Voyager probes, where it is the only opera aria on board. Both spacecraft have long since crossed into interstellar space. Somewhere beyond the reach of the sun, the Queen of the Night is still raging, her high Fs drifting outward among the stars. If an aria was ever going to represent humanity to the universe, it makes a certain sense that we chose the one almost none of us can sing.
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