Publisher's Synopsis
Mozart's penultimate opera, The Magic Flute, presents an inextricable mixture of the unspoken and sung word, high principle and low cunning, the refined and the earthy, the sublime and the comic, for which reasons the rendering of the original German text into English has always been a problem. The present complete translation, by the most distinguished translator of opera libretti of our time, Andrew Porter, magically succeeds in giving us a wonderfully lucid and musical singing text that preserves all the authentic contrasts and yet has imposed on it a unity that derives from Mr Porter's sensibility and acute intelligence.
