Revisiting Mozart’s Queen of the Night: Outrage Out of This World

Aria Code

When the Voyager spacecraft set off to explore the galaxy in 1977, it carried a recording to represent the best of humanity. The “Golden Record” featured everyone from Bach to Chuck Berry, but there was only one opera aria: the rage-fest and coloratura masterpiece from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.”

As Kathryn Lewek reprises her role as Queen of the Night in this season’s holiday presentation of “The Magic Flute” at The Metropolitan Opera, we’re revisiting this episode. Host Rhiannon Giddens and her guests consider why the Queen of the Night’s big moment – “Der Hölle Rache” – is an out-of-this-world achievement, how Mozart created a profound fairy tale for adults and what it takes for a soprano to reach the stratosphere. You’ll witness Kathryn Lewek hit all those high notes onstage at the Met Opera and hear from Timothy Ferris, the man who produced NASA’s “Golden Record.”

The Guests

Soprano Kathryn Lewek describes singing “Der Hölle Rache” as throwing darts with your eyes closed. But after performing the part more than 200 times, she certainly knows how to hit the bullseye.

Harvard University professor Carolyn Abbate once took her son to see The Magic Flute and he declared it to be “bad, but not in the way I expected it to be bad.” Her latest book is A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred Years.

Composer and author Jan Swafford was a graduate student when he spent his last $50 to buy a copy of The Magic Flute and immediately regretted it: He hated the opera. To say he’s warmed to Mozart over the years would be a wild understatement.

Timothy Ferris produced the Golden Record that went up with NASA’s Voyager space probes in 1977. It was the only record he ever produced, but he's written many books including Coming of Age in the Milky Way, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.