Looking to Ancient Egypt: The Cleveland Museum of Art’s Africa & Byzantium and Mozart’s The Magic Flute

_{Author’s note: This article was adapted from a May 24, 2024, preperformance talk for The Magic Flute staged at Cleveland’s Severance Music Center as part of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Opera and Humanities Festival. All photographs were taken 2022–24 by the author except where noted.}

While linking an exhibition about historical African art and an 18th-century Austrian opera may not seem obvious, there are deep connections between them. Both the opera and artworks in the exhibition are full of hidden meanings, many tied to the historical arts of Egypt, located in northern Africa. Here, I’ll consider how Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 1791 opera The Magic Flute—and its libretto (text set to music) by Emanuel Schikaneder—expressed 18th-century Enlightenment-era and Masonic European ideas about ancient Egypt. As a contrast, I’ll use artworks from Africa & Byzantium to show how Egyptian and Nubian artists drew from their pharaonic artistic past.

Africa & Byzantium considers the complex artistic relationships between northern and eastern African Christian kingdoms and the Byzantine Empire from the fourth century and beyond. The show includes nearly 160 works of secular and sacred art from across geographies and faiths, mostly made by African artists or imported onto the continent at the request of the powerful rulers of precolonial kingdoms and empires. The arts and faiths of these historical kingdoms— including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam––resonate worldwide with many today. The exhibition includes many artworks made in Egypt, including some borrowed from Egyptian museums. This is the first time in 30 years that the CMA has borrowed art from Egypt.

In The Magic Flute, Mozart and Schikaneder also looked to the African past to write a new opera that reflected their present. Ancient Egypt fascinated Mozart, Schikaneder, and the Freemason fraternal organization they belonged to. Like Nubian and later Egyptian artists whose creations interpreted pharaonic legacies, The Magic Flute considers these histories in pieces like the aria “O Isis und Osiris.” 

The Magic Flute premiered in 1791, centuries after pharaonic rule ended in Egypt. Schikaneder’s libretto is where connections to ancient Egypt—or at least, ideas about ancient Egypt—are strongest. Both Mozart and Schikaneder were members of a Masonic lodge in Vienna, Austria. The Freemasons, a men’s secret society, evolved from European medieval stonebuilders’ guilds. The Masons adapted their rituals, beliefs, and customs from their interpretations of non-European cultures. Both the Masonic rites and the libretto of The Magic Flute were based on Jean Terrasson’s 1731 novel The Life of Sethos. Terrasson’s writing popularized the concept of “Egyptian mysteries” in Europe. Starting in the 1600s, European scholars began to write about Egypt in a speculative way. 

True scholarly study of ancient Egypt didn’t start until the 1799 discovery of the Rosetta Stone. Its multilingual inscriptions allowed scholars to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. Finally, ancient Egyptian perspectives could be read for the first time in centuries. Writing in 1731, before hieroglyphics were deciphered, Terrasson based his description of Egyptian initiations on Greek and Roman texts. Greeks started writing about Egypt in the sixth century BCE, often centuries after Egyptian monuments or artworks were made. These Greek and Roman authors were not always factual. They speculated, created legends, or changed stories to make connections with Greek culture. Using these thirdhand sources about ancient Egypt made Terrasson’s novel like the game of telephone, where the message gets scrambled as it moves between players. 

Consequently, Terrasson’s novel and Masonic or other Enlightenment-era texts based on it––like The Magic Flute’s libretto––were founded on European ideas rather than facts about Egypt. Ancient Egypt fascinated the Masons and Enlightenment thinkers. They believed that its symbols contained long-held secrets related to biblical, ancient Greek, and other wisdoms.

Stage directions in Schikaneder’s libretto establish The Magic Flute’s Egyptian setting. These include Egyptian priests, a pyramid shape in a temple, and even nine pyramids improbably set in a forest of silver trees. I can’t say I saw any silvery trees at the Pyramids of Giza, but definitely lots of sand!

The frontispiece—or first illustration—of the original 1791 libretto reinforces this setting. Ignaz Alberti, a Viennese Mason, designed it. As described in another stage direction, ruined columns and a pyramid or obelisk lie in a temple courtyard. The three-sided pyramid appealed to the Freemasons, who gave special meaning to the number. We see the three in the pyramid symbol and the square-and-compasses used by the Masons, and in The Magic Flute. We also hear three chords at the opera’s start: E-flat major, C minor, and another E-flat major. To most audiences, the three chords are a signal to pay attention to the performers. A Masonic audience would connect the opening three chords with the three knocks that begin their secret meetings. 

Art holds similar hidden meanings. Artists use a visual vocabulary that can be both appreciated on the surface and have deeper meaning to those with cultural knowledge. A symbol in the libretto’s frontispiece (♀) can represent either the planet Venus or an ankh (☥), an ancient Egyptian symbol of eternal life. Venus is the Roman goddess of love. Artists often depicted Venus wearing attributes of Isis, like her crown. Isis is the Egyptian goddess linked to fertility, magic, and motherhood. The Egyptian deities Isis and Osiris are often evoked in The Magic Flute.

Sarastro, a king, leads a council of priests dedicated to Isis and Osiris. In act 2, he and the priests sing the aria “O Isis und Osiris” to ask the gods to bless Pamina and Tamino before he undertakes several ordeals. The blessings and knowledge of the mysteries of Isis continue to inflect the play. Again, we are not talking about the truths of Egypt in The Magic Flute. These are myths and ideas about Egypt adopted by Enlightenment-era Europeans and by Freemasons like Mozart and Schikaneder. A 17th- and 18th-century intellectual movement, the Enlightenment favored reason over superstition and religion. Like artworks in CMA’s exhibition Africa & Byzantium, this Enlightenment-era musical creation looked to Egypt’s past for inspiration.

In ancient Egypt, the sibling-spouses Isis and Osiris were two of the most worshiped deities. After resurrecting her brother-husband after his death, believers linked the goddess Isis to the afterlife. First a king, Osiris transformed into a god of the afterlife after his death. Isis became popular across the Mediterranean Sea region.

A painter made this image of Isis that is included in Africa & Byzantium in the second century CE, when the Roman Empire ruled Egypt. Its style and iconography (symbolism) are part of Hellenic (Greco-Roman) tradition. Yet, the work’s meaning has roots in Egyptian religion. This woman has features of the goddess Isis, including a feathered crown rising from a horn-framed sun disk. Imagery that combined different forms of belief remained popular in Egypt through the early Byzantine period.

Northern Africans in an area they called Kemet created rich objects and structures for their faith. What we now call ancient Egypt became a Roman imperial province in 30 BCE, ending millennia of rule by Egypt-based pharaohs. Egypt was politically part of the Byzantine Empire for 246 years between 395 and 641 CE. Byzantium’s religion was officially Christian, yet Egypt’s old religion endured. Egyptians worshiped their goddess Isis at the Philae temple into the 500s until it was converted into a church and crosses carved into its walls. Temples like the one at Philae inspired the original settings in The Magic Flute’s libretto.

Symbols also persisted from pharaonic-era Egypt into the Byzantine era. Yet, those legacies aren’t always clear. Our understanding became skewed when some past scholars, archaeologists, and curators removed or downplayed evidence of Africa’s artistic history. Hellenic (Greco-Roman) in style, this portrait was removed from a body case decorated with Egyptian symbols and imagery. However, archaeologists only valued and kept the Hellenic-style painting. Despite political changes, ancient Egyptian mummification and other religious practices endured. Greeks and Romans in the Hellenic world only cremated or buried remains.

A highlight of this painting under the CMA’s care and on view in Africa & Byzantium is the crown applied to the painting with gold leaf. From the time the Greeks ruled Egypt starting in 30 BCE, Egyptians used wreath-crowns for awards, in funerary contexts, and possibly in initiations. Schikaneder likely learned about them via Enlightenment-era sources that cited these earlier accounts. Following the initiation scene, Tamino and Pamina each are crowned. In some productions, the crown is made of leaves, like these.

Returning to the painting in Africa & Byzantium, it’s only when we consider its context that its African heritage becomes clearer. The individual or their family’s choice of mummification reflected historical Egyptian practices of creating a physical “duplicate” for the deceased’s soul to rest in. Their decision to color her lips gold may symbolize how death transformed someone into an akh (an effective spirit). The continued use of hieroglyphics and Egyptian religious symbols shows the continuation of this religion long after the pharaohs’ rule ended. In contrast, the clothing and hairstyle show the embrace of contemporary ideals of Hellenic (Greco-Roman) Egyptian identity. Like the woman whose body case is on view in Cairo, the woman in this painting likely had Egyptian religious motifs surrounding her in death.

Enlightenment-era Europeans like the librettist Schikaneder were mad for Egyptian pyramids. However, Nubia (now Sudan) has the most pyramids in the world. The Nubian Kingdom of Kush began around 1069 BCE. After Kush fell, several regional organizations of elites transformed into new kingdoms. The independent Nubian kingdoms of Nobadia, Makouria, and Alwa adopted Christianity by choice from the 500s. Cosmopolitan Nubian Christian cities were centers of arts, trade, religion, and learning. Always politically independent, Nubian royalty were culturally linked with Byzantium.

Choosing to become Christian and adapt aspects of Byzantine dress and court culture, however, did not mean forgetting one’s past. Crowns were key ways of expressing Nubian heritage and access to foreign art forms. Crowns also play a role in The Magic Flute. Egyptianesque priests crown Pamina and Tamino in the final scene. This cements their connections with the temple of Isis and Osiris to an ideal of the African past.

This king’s crown on view in Africa & Byzantium was made just before Nubian rulers chose to become Christian in the 500s. Nubian kings and queens maintained indigenous symbols in their royal attire while forging relationships with Christian counterparts in the nearby Aksumite Empire (Ethiopia and Eritrea) and distant Byzantium. This broad circle of gem-encrusted beaten silver is full of symbols that evoke traditional Nile-valley signs of authority. Notably, it does not look like a Byzantine crown!

The front feather and the pharaoh’s heads around the sides refer to when Nubian pharaohs ruled over ancient Egypt in the 25th dynasty (754–656 BCE). At center is a ram’s head adapted from the earlier Nubian Kingdom of Kush. Amun was a powerful ram-headed deity who protected Kushite kings. The crown is adorned using Byzantine techniques of setting polished stones into metal rims. Similar settings are used in Byzantine married women’s jewelry, also on view. This crown demonstrates how its African wearer knew the power of both his artistic and political Nubian legacy and his connections with contemporary regional culture. Through works like these on view in Africa & Byzantium, we understand both the unique histories of distinctive African civilizations and how they participated in greater regional spheres of faith, politics, and visual culture.

Though politically independent, Nubia’s Christian kingdoms’ courtly culture and arts first followed Byzantine trends. This changed in the medieval era: the Byzantine Empire became distant from the Nubian kingdoms after losing control over Egypt. Medieval Nubian artists reflected this political change through increased historical references. In this painting from Nubia’s Faras Cathedral (established in the 600s), Christ raises his hand in blessing to protect a young man identified as Prince Aaron. The half-moon projection on the young prince’s crown references Nubian royal power from far earlier.

It is linked to the Nubian lion-god Apedemak, god of war and conquest, often depicted standing on a crescent moon. Nubian crowns, such as this one on view at the Nubian Museum in Aswan, Egypt, also featured crescent moons. As this was painted in the 1100s, it looks back about 700 years into Nubian history to reference a local symbol of African power. Like for Schikaneder writing his libretto for The Magic Flute, the African past formed a major part of the artist’s visual references.

Ancient Egyptian art, culture, and faith still inspire artists, musicians, and performers today. Outside of Egypt, new conversations about culture and cultural appropriation make us think anew about who can evoke Egypt. These conversations didn’t happen in Mozart and Schikaneder’s time. Their references to Egypt––or rather, to European ideas about Egypt—were part of Enlightenment-era conversations about seeking truth and knowledge by evoking the past. For late antique-era Egyptian and Nubian artists, evoking ancient Egypt had the different purpose of honoring cultural heritage and linking present-day leaders to long lineages of power. Today, productions of The Magic Flute––including recent performances here in Cleveland—often ignore the original “Egyptian” stage directions. Instead, they translate it through contemporary ideas and ideals of the world.

Africa & Byzantium is on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art through July 21, 2024. For more information, visit our website.