The best Queen of the Night aria [Mozart's Magic Flute]

[Photo of soprano Erna Berger, nine years after her performance. Source: Sandy Steiglitz]

I've been enjoying a shoot out of various performances of my all-time favorite opera aria. It is the Queen of the Night's from Mozart's The Magic Flute. The high f3 is exhilerating.

Background: I took a CD version of highlights from The Magic Flute travelling with me back in 1990, and listened to it on headphones over and over while travelling through South East Asia and Australia. I've since lost that copy and frustratingly don't recall the details.

A few years back, while systematically watching all the Criterion DVDs through Netflix, I watched Ingmar Bergman's The Magic Flute. I anticipated a chore, since opera seemed to require undue patience, but the movie turned out to make sense of the story, and highlight a gorgeous opera (albeit sung in Swedish).

Since then, I've been collecting different performances of this opera, and the radical differences in interpretation opened my mind to the importance of the conductor. [It helped that for one of these critical shoot outs with the opera, my father, a conductor, clearly articulated the other conductors approaches].

My current favorite is Erna Berger's 1937, Berlin performance under Sir Thomas Beecham. Berger's delivery is the fastest I've heard, but also the most passionate, conveying the urgency.

Its clearly a tough role, technically demanding since few sopranos can consistently reach the high f3, and to convey the evil, vengeful character without characature is challenging. And for one of the most transcendant, beautiful moments in opera to be a mother's directive to her daughter to go kill someone: "A vengeful Hell doth pulse within my heart", once again, not easy.

I'm hoping to add more thoughts on other performances:

1. Karin Ott's 1980 performance for Karajan in Berlin
2. Edita Gruberova's 1978 delivery for Lombard in Strasbourg
3. ...for Solti in Vienna