The Art Of The Flute

Description

The Art of the Flute: Mozart Kuhlau Françaix Saint-Saëns Poulenc   A Short History of the Flute The flute has suffered all kinds of unfairness in the history of human music-making. Yet we, who are in its service, were we ever to fall out of fashion once again, could always point to the fact that we were the first. The oldest musical instrument found so far is 50,000 years old, with four holes, made from the bone of a bear and discovered in Divje Baba in Slovenia. The clarinet, on the other hand, which has replaced us in the favour of composers for more than a hundred years, first appeared in the middle of the eighteenth century. The title and the dramatic instrumentation of The Magic Flute suggest the origin of the flute from the early mythology of mankind. Tamino's flute and Papageno's pan-pipes exemplify the mythological significance of the two instruments. On the one hand the flute is valued as a gift of the gods, as a pure, sacred, cult instrument par excellence. Ebony in heraldry is the material for the recorder and the transverse flute, the wood from which the throne of Pluto, god of the dead, was fashioned. Ivory was used for the throne of Solomon and symbolizes strength and purity (only Tamino's magic flute comes from the tree of the lecherous Jupiter, the oak). On the other hand the flute symbolized the most earthly of desires: the pan-pipe owed their existence to the predicament of the nymph Syrinx who, distressed by an impending sexual assault from the god Pan, turned into a reed. The monster cut the phallus-shaped plant and played music on it to stem his desire, without thereby noticeably reforming. The pan-pipes symbolize at the same time the virginity of the syrinx - while, conversely, the history of art is full of pornographic pictures featuring the recorder and transverse flute. A second musical legend, incidentally, suggests the coarse, animal aspect: Midas, the King of the Phrygians, who declared the lecherous demi-god Pan a better musician than Apollo. The god punished this ridiculous hubris with the ears of an ass which the King hid under a voluminous cap. Only the King's barber knew of this and when he could no longer keep this spectacular fact to himself he dug a hole in the ground and shouted into it: 'King Midas has the ears of an ass!'. On that place, however, reeds grew up that, when they were disturbed by the wind, sang the barber's words. So The Magic Flute is a study of the dual nature of the instrument, the sublime and the animal. At the same time, however, it brings out clearly the dilemma: the flute is present here as a symbol, but the orchestral tasks allotted to it are modest indeed. There is Tamino's aria, the flute motif itself, a bizarrely lustful outburst of the piccolo in the aria of the presumed eunuch Monostatos, the fire and water trials and, essentially, that is all there is. There are flutes from the beginning of mankind in all cultures. In Europe this had been understood since th