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In Prague, in a production of The Magic Flute—it dates back more or less some fifty years—the Queen of the Night, after her unsuccessful attempt as part of the stage action to invade the sacred domain of the sun, vanished through a trap door, along with her entourage, according to the opera guide, flung into eternal darkness amid thunder and lightning.—In a production of the same opera in Breslau the Queen of the Night, consigned to perdition, as the program states, disappeared, engulfed in fire and smoke, by tottering off behind the stage set on the right, followed by Monostatos and the Three Ladies.—In a festival performance of The Magic Flute in Salzburg at around the same time the Queen of the Night’s exit was overseen, as the program has it, by the workings of Providence, which—albeit silently, “still / still / still”—thwarts her dastardly scheme to invade the Temple of Isis by having her collapse to the stage floor, as if struck by lightning, thus banishing her to eternal darkness, even though she remained prostrate and motionless on stage until the transformation scene.—The Magic Flute was also performed in Aachen at this time; there the scene in which the Queen of the Night and her followers are destroyed was simply cut.—In a production of The Magic Flute in Regensburg the Queen of the Night attempted to make her way via a staircase into the Temple of the Sun; met by Sarastro amid thunder and lightning, and swallowed up by Hades, according to the program booklet, the Queen of the Night pitched headlong into the void, landing on pads and cushions piled up high.—In a special performance for the National Socialist Leisure Organization in Graz, the Queen of the Night and the blackamoor ended by staggering off to the right as if blinded, representing thereby the triumph of the Spiritual-Masculine over the Chthonic-Feminine, as the introductory lecture had expressed it, while the Three Ladies exited at the rear stage left so as—transformation scene—to yield place to the noble couple in the radiant glory of the sacred sunlight.
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When, on one given evening, the Queen of the Night from the Prague Magic Flute, after being flung into eternal darkness amid thunder and lightning, vanishing through a trap door and then emerging from it underneath the stage, had returned to her dressing room for a brief pause, she found waiting for her three men in street clothes whose demeanor seemed to suggest that the place was at their disposal. Someone must have slandered the singer, because without having done anything wrong she was at once arrested by the men, so that even after the apotheosis at the end—the entire theater is transformed into a sun—she was no longer able to appear on stage. The initial interrogation took place right there in the dressing room. The first charge leveled by the gentlemen was an accusation of activities harmful to the state: during her engagement as the soprano in a German Cantata by Fidelio F. Finke, a composer of the very highest rank and a member of the party, she had, several times and in front of witnesses, delivered herself of disparaging and mean-spirited remarks about this work; she had, to be specific, lampooned the composer’s name, Fidelio F. Finke, and referred instead to Fidelio Rat-Fink, thus evaluating his choral work O Heartland Bohemia, a hymn praising the liberation of Bohemia, as a ratty piece of music and additionally degrading this composition with malicious cultural-Bolshevistic intent by tacking onto the title O Heartland Bohemia the nonsensical phrase Land by the Sea; moreover, by stating that the day was coming when the Reich flag which had been raised over Prague Castle would be nothing more than ragged tatters in the storm, she had completely forfeited her rights and her membership in the Community of the German People.
Without having done anything wrong, aside from on stage, the Queen of the Night, during a Sunday afternoon performance in Breslau, after tottering off behind the set engulfed in fire and smoke and being consigned to perdition, was taken into custody by officers of the Gestapo waiting to meet her; even before the Queen of the Night’s last entrance, while Tamino was still being led to the gates of terror so as to hazard his way through fire and water, these plainclothes officials had taken positions throughout the theater. The Queen of the Night was led to a storage warehouse, where she was confronted with an allegation submitted by one of the stage managers to the effect that she had repeatedly made fun of Sarastro, specifically in his capacity as radiant bearer of light, which was how the visionary National Socialist viewpoint understood him; the name Sarastro should be written with a double ‘r’ and a double ‘s’—Sarrasstro, that is—so that several associations of thought would be made clear: arrest, but also the English word—English!—ass, or the French—French!—assassin; in addition, and worse yet, she had been saying the war was long since lost, thereby engaging in troop demoralization and providing aid and comfort to the enemy.
When, after the final performance, the Queen of the Night in the production at the Salzburg Festival—the premiere had been attended by regional and national Reich party functionaries of the very highest rank—had been banished into eternal darkness and collapsed onto the stage floor as if struck by lightning and was thereafter proceeding to leave the theater, the only hindrance that detained her for a short time was a group of opera aficionados asking for autographs. On the morning of the following day, however, she was called on in her hotel room by certain uncouth individuals, men she had of course not invited. The police officers opened their interrogation with a question as to where and with whom she had spent the night after the premiere. Inasmuch as her answers—alone in her hotel room, and it was scarcely any of the gentlemen’s concern in the first place—did not satisfy these henchmen but kept giving rise to an ever more threatening demeanor on their part instead, the singer acknowledged that she had passed the night in her hotel room with a highly placed dignitary of the Reich, someone who, as a token of his admiration, had made his way to her dressing room with flowers and into whose protection she would forthwith commend herself if the gentlemen did not leave the room immediately. None of this made any impression on the Gestapo men; far from leaving, they assured her that they were conducting this official inquiry expressly for the protection of said highly placed dignitary, the reason being that something of immense import had been imparted to them by a confidential source: in her dressing room before a performance, with her hand held up to her mouth and with great titters of contempt, she, the Queen of the Night, is said to have told her stage daughter Pamina about her night with Reichsleiter Bormann; not only that, however, as if it weren’t already bad enough, she had trespassed so far beyond all bounds as to make an assertion which, to put it as mildly as possible, could raise doubts about her very sanity; specifically, it was—he hardly dared repeat it out loud—that Reichsleiter Bormann, second in rank only to the Führer himself, was a Jew, that he was—circumcised! Bormann circumcised, the spokesman was screaming, red in the face; that was going to cost her dearly; spreading such rumors proved she was nothing but a Queen of the benighted, a monarch of mental derangement! The makeup artist had been on the alert, though; she had eavesdropped, had heard everything and promptly brought the matter to the attention of the authorities.
One winter evening in Aachen, just as a performance of The Magic Flute was coming to an end, an incident occurred that attracted hardly any notice, thanks to the discretion with which it was handled. Even while the Queen of the Night was still displaying on stage her mastery of her coloratura aria “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen,” several gentlemen in leather coats were conducting a search of the singer’s dressing room, located on the second floor of the theater, the search taking place, according to a confidential statement by the assistant conductor, with the consent of the artistic director, who was also the chief conductor. An hour earlier, just when Sarastro had assembled on stage the priests of the circle of the sun, those officers had been ransacking the singer’s apartment. As the fire curtain was being slowly lowered after the final bows, the singer, charged with having fraudulently obtained through forged certificates membership in the Reich Music League and the Community of the German People, was arrested and taken away.
A rehearsal pianist at the State Theater in Regensburg, rejected as a lover and brooding revenge because of his wounded pride, was to prove the undoing of the singer engaged as the Queen of the Night. During his efforts to court her favor, which gradually changed more and more into jealous and secret surveillance of the unattached singer, this musician had made certain observations that led him to surmise there was something suspicious going on in the apartment of the woman he loved and kept under such close scrutiny, something which might not be without relevance to her so persistently denying him the much-desired fruits of the night. The fact was that he had at one point observed a man leave the building without turning on any lights and get into a waiting truck, which had then hastily driven off, while at the same time a curtain dropped back into place behind one of the windows in the singer’s unlit apartment as if it had earlier been moved aside. Shortly thereafter an anonymously placed telephone report concerning the singer was received by the Gestapo. One evening, just as the Queen of the Night was singing the aria “Oh zittre nicht, mein lieber Sohn” on stage, the Gestapo was questioning the singer’s neighbors; as the Queen of the Night was making her way by stealth up the staircase to a side gate of the Temple, there to be met by thunder and lightning and to pitch headlong into the void and thus be swallowed up by Hades, though in fact landing on pads and cushions piled high, the police officers, in a state of extraordinary satisfaction thanks to the results of their inquiries—in particular, a dentist and SS squad leader named Coldewey had provided them valuable information—were already on their way to the theater. As she was leaving the building by the stage door the Queen of the Night was arrested on a charge of aiding and abetting the escape of a man on the wanted list, an enemy of the state and a poisonous influence on the German people. The soprano completely took the wind out of the rehearsal pianist’s sails by remarking that he had made his denunciations either because he was merely trying to win her gratitude for coming to her rescue or because he simply wanted to make himself important, whereupon he locked himself inside the theater and jumped from the highest point in the flyloft onto the stage, where he succumbed to his injuries during the night.
The Queen of the Night and the blackamoor Monostatos from the performance for the National Socialist Leisure Organization in Graz were played by a married couple. One evening, when they staggered off to the rear as if blinded, their exit representing the triumph of the Spiritual-Masculine over the Chthonic-Feminine, they stumbled—to the woman’s astonishment, to the man’s horror—directly into the hands of hulking Styrian state policemen and morals officers, who explained to them that they were under arrest, Monastatos for racial pollution and the Queen of the Night for possible cognizance and complicity. The spokesman for these behemoths produced by way of proof a letter addressed to the singer portraying Monostatos but intercepted by a spy—“Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see”—and asked whether the esteemed spouse really had no inkling that her husband, on stage the leader of the blackamoors, had entered so fully into his role as a negro and a traitor as no longer to be able to tell the difference between acting and real life inasmuch as he was now in a liaison—it had developed little by little—with a gypsy woman or, to be exact, had been in a liaison, since it had by now been put to an end, unless the gentleman would care to take a trip to see his true Queen of the Night, as he called the gypsy whore in a letter, in the concentration camp at Lackenbach; there, however, the relevant organ, her—laughter—gypsy cunt was required for other, higher purposes, in that the woman was to be selected for sterilization experiments using the South American arum plant, Caladium seguinum, conducted by a select staff of physicians in cooperation with the Pharmacological Institute, to be followed up, should they fail, with further experiments using radiation.—The woman who sang the Queen of the Night, less distraught by the alleged adultery than by the revoltingly thuggish manner in which the Styrian police were bringing forward their allegations, was finally permitted to return to her dressing room; the Monostatos, on the other hand, was conducted to the basement of the theater for his first round of interrogation, where he was mistreated to the severest extent by officers Müller and Aurich.
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The Queen of the Night in Prague, vanishing through a trapdoor—thunder and lightning, eternal darkness—and shortly thereafter arrested in her dressing room and interrogated there by men in street clothes, was then taken in a limousine to headquarters at the Eden Hotel, locked in a cell, and over the next several days examined by a Doctor Gross for possible mental illness or nervous disorder. One morning the singer, slated for transfer to the insane asylum of Cholm, a clinic for nervous ailments, was crammed into a truck used for gassing people though disguised, if only in a slapdash way, as a Red Cross truck: in this G-truck, as those vehicles were called, she met her death while journeying into the unknown.
The Queen of the Night in the Breslau Magic Flute (fire and smoke, perdition), taken into custody during a Sunday afternoon performance and subjected to an initial interrogation in the storage warehouse, was released, only to be arrested once again several hours later in her apartment while making preparations to flee as hastily as she could; she was consigned to the local penitentiary, there to await execution for troop demoralization and providing aid and comfort to the enemy.
In Salzburg, on the morning after the final performance of The Magic Flute at the Festival—banished into eternal darkness—the Queen of the Night, waylaid in her hotel room by three plainclothes officers and following a heated exchange of words, was placed under arrest, led away through a delivery entrance so as to avoid attracting attention, and taken to Gestapo headquarters at the Abbey of Saint Peter. All through the ensuing interrogations her offense was at times treated as an outrage too unspeakable even to be uttered and at other times as a conspiracy whose every detail was furiously rehashed and whose planners and ringleaders the singer was browbeaten into naming if she valued her life. Inquiries by concerned artistic colleagues were rebuffed with unmistakably pointed threats. What became of the Queen of the Night, then, can only be surmised; the fact is, however, that about six months later some of the singer’s distant relatives received an official notification to the effect that she had succumbed to pneumonia on the journey to Theresienstadt.
All trace of the Queen of the Night in Aachen, who stood accused of gaining fraudulent memberships in key organizations and was arrested with the consent of the head conductor (he was also the theater manager) as the fire curtain was being lowered and taken to an unknown destination—all trace of her vanishes at the stage door; one speculation has it that the singer died in the concentration camp of Natzweiler, though a different conjecture suggests that she succeeded in fleeing to South America by way of Casablanca.
On the basis of a denunciation by a rehearsal pianist in love with the singer but with no hope of winning her, the Queen of the Night from the Regensburg Magic Flute—staircase into the void—was taken into custody and placed in jail on suspicion of aiding and abetting an enemy of the state to escape. During the course of interrogations that lasted all night concerning the whereabouts of this menace to the German people, she took advantage of a brief moment in which the investigating officers’ attention was distracted and jumped out of the office window to her death without revealing one single detail.
The woman singing the Queen of the Night in the performance of The Magic Flute in Graz for the National Socialist Leisure Organization (triumph of the Spiritual-Masculine over the Chthonic-Feminine), who, along with her husband, the singer portraying Monostatos, had fallen into the hands of Styrian state police and morals officers, was permitted—whereas her husband, still made up as the blackamoor, which gave rise to additional spiteful jollity, was interrogated in the basement of the theater and subjected to the severest of mistreatment by officers Müller and Aurich in connection with a charge of racial pollution, as it was called, with a gypsy woman (Camp Lackenbach, sterilization, South American arum plant)—was permitted to return to her dressing room to change clothes, but only under escort. She ended up being released, although she would never again see her husband, whose later transfer to a concentration camp was spoken of with complete approval in Graz theater circles. That was the point at which she fell victim to a nervous condition that would never again allow her to set foot on an opera stage or sing coloratura roles any longer; from then on she eked out a living as a lieder singer, primarily of songs by the Styrian composers Hugo Wolf and Joseph Marx.—Her husband, the Monostatos in Graz, was relocated from the main camp to a sub-camp, infamous at the time but forgotten today, at the southern border of the Reich, and assigned to help build tunnels. He was shot there one night, outside the camp fence, in an attempt to escape, or so it was claimed. They found a piece of paper on the murdered man with the following note:
The huts in the two camps are located along the old pass, next to the tunnel entrances before and beyond the mountains. The camp at the north portal of the tunnel in progress is smaller than the one situated at the south portal. The command center’s offices are housed in the south camp, and the commandant of the south camp is the superior of the commandant of the north camp; this head camp commandant is named Winkler and is feared for his harshness. Mail, food, and all additional supplies, along with new prisoners, come by way of Neumarktl, the place where a railroad line ends down in the valley. The guards barter soap and mattresses with the farmers in exchange for schnaps. At night the prisoners are sometimes chased outside the camp boundaries by dogs so they can be shot from behind as they’re trying to escape. And yet it might be possible to endure all this if I just knew one thing. What became of her, the Queen of the Night?
