Voice in The Magic Flute - Representing 'Low' Characters and Negotiating Gender

The fourth volume section – GENDERING – looks at music and related sonic practices as a domain in which oppressive categorizations of gender, sex, and class are both stabilized and opened up. In the process, the cultural perception, regulation, and staging of the human voice emerges as a key site of contestation. In his contribution, Frederik Beister tests cultural and music studies scholar Richard Middleton’s proposals regarding the emancipatory potentials of Mozart’s eighteenth-century opera The Magic Flute. Following Middleton in reading the opera as a complex negotiation of ‘the high’ and the ‘the low’ that reaches across the domains of class, gender, and cultural value, Beister finally has Mozart’s operatic performance of the popular enter into an analytical duet with Daft Punk.