La flauta de Dios

La flauta de Dios names the image through which Antonio Salieri understands Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s music: Mozart is the mortal flute, and God the inexorable musician whose voice sounds through him. The metaphor makes artistic creation at once miraculous and costly. Mozart’s music seems to embody a peace and beauty beyond ordinary life, while the body that carries it is vulnerable to exhaustion and death.

The image and its meaning

Salieri develops the image while recalling The Magic Flute. He sees the opera’s Masonic imagery transformed into a vision of an eternal order: priests welcome the world, an immense sun rises over a timeless land, and the poisons people inflict on one another burn away in its light. In that radiant scene, Mozart’s father appears not as an accusing figure but as a merciful high priest. Salieri reads the change as a definitive legend in which Wolfgang is no longer afraid of Leopold, and hears in the music a peace newly found within Mozart.

The flute is therefore more than a figure for musical talent. Mozart is the means through which a vision becomes audible, but Salieri also sees him as palpably mortal and fragile. The metaphor holds divine abundance and human limitation together: the music seems to exceed its maker even as it depends on him.

Music amid authority and restraint

The image gains force against the play’s recurring disputes over who may determine what music should be. Joseph II commissions Mozart to write a comic opera in German as part of his wish to establish a national opera. Johann von Strack conveys that wish, while Count Orsini-Rosemberg objects to German as an operatic language and Gottfried van Swieten questions comedy’s place in music. The commission thus places Mozart’s work within competing expectations about language, genre, and court authority.

A later confrontation makes that pressure concrete. When the Emperor arrives during a performance and the dancers perform without music because the dance passage has been cut, he asks whether the music is modern. Mozart denies it; Joseph then orders Count Orsini-Rosemberg to restore the music and insists on hearing Mozart’s work complete. The scene does not itself use the flute image, but it shows the institutional forces that can interrupt or constrain the music Salieri regards as a voice beyond ordinary human purposes.

The instrument breaks

After Mozart’s death, Salieri reports that the death certificate gives kidney failure, accelerated by exposure to cold. Gottfried van Swieten has paid for a pauper’s funeral, where Mozart is buried with twenty other bodies in an unmarked lime pit. Against this concrete account of bodily vulnerability, Salieri returns to the metaphor: he says he weakened God’s flute to its utmost feebleness, yet God continued to blow, as God must. The flute cracked in the mouth of that insatiable demand.

The image’s ending refuses a simple triumph of divine music over mortality. Mozart’s music has seemed to make a vision of peace present, but its human bearer has been worn down. Salieri confesses relief at Mozart’s death and also compassion for the man he helped destroy; he says that he felt compassion for God, which he had never been able to feel before. In that reversal, the metaphor becomes an indictment as well as an expression of awe: the music’s inexhaustibility does not spare the instrument through which it is heard.