‘Instead of Destroying My Body I Have a Reason for Maintaining It’

This chapter assesses the encounter between a youth opera group and Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. Singing opera gave the young women in this group a sense of control and embodied confidence, negating the body image issues that several of them described. Against this, the strongly gendered institutional and cultural context of classical music, including the musical-dramatic text of The Magic Flute itself, undermined this experience thanks to the ideology of ‘fidelity’ to origins and authenticity that is normative in classical music culture. This inhibited the radical potential of the bodily empowerment that the young women experienced through limiting the possibilities for re-imagining the musical text, thus also limiting any possibilities for changing the practices that bring the text to life.