Five years ago I hiked in the Bandelier National Monument in Frijoles Canyon, New Mexico (a previous report on my adventure with lots of photographs is in the link.)

It is an incredible place, a plateau formed by volcanic eruptions, with steep rocks made of volcanic ash, their crevices enlarged and inhabited by the Ancestral Pueblo People living there over 10.000 years ago, grid farming at the bottom of the canyon and adjacent mesas.

The canyon is bisected by a small creek, carrying scant water for most of the year. On occasion it brings death: when wildfires destroy the upper watershed, as happened in 2011 and, worse, 2013, flash floods ensue and take out entire parts of the extant vegetation, the last remnants of old forest included. The devastation was visible everywhere when I visited, but so was new life, small pines that had survived and young cotton trees in verdant green that radiated against the grey, pink and white of the tuff rocks. Swallows and ravens flew overhead, I saw quail along the path and woodpeckers were busy.

I don’t know if it was the quail running – I suddenly thought of Mozart’s Papageno, the bird catcher in Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. One of his arias (Hm! Hm! Hm! Hm! Hm! Hm! Hm! Hm!) has the same speed and staccato feel as the passing quail did. (The name Papageno actually comes from Papagei, the German word for parrot.) In any case, the opera is about how things in life never unfold in a straight line, how trials and tribulations need to be weathered with persistence, courage and fortitude to arrive at a satisfactory (or happy, if you’re lucky) ending. Nature in front of me contained both, downfall and renewal. The music in my head – its beauty as breathtaking as the canyon around me, as filigree as the fresh greenery on the saplings – was tightly linked to the same alternations in my own life.

During the seemingly endless years spent in bed with childhood diseases, rubella, mumps, the measles, whooping cough, ear infections and later staph infections, I was allowed to listen to a small radio my mother brought up from the kitchen. There was a program called Schulfunk (school radio) that educated young listeners for an hour or two during the week days. It was started in 1924, but after the war it really took off, with the opening music being Papageno’s first aria. It is probably the only piece of operatic music that every German person of my generation knows by heart.

Everyday, in addition to language, biology, music or physics instruction, there was an episode in this program acted out by famous actors, of some dilemma or social conflict happening in a small village, not unlike the one I lived in. The character in News from Waldhagen (Neues aus Waldhagen) represented all aspects of society, and were as familiar to us as the Sesame Street characters would later be for TV audiences in the U.S. The social studies message was uniformly one of “peace, pals and pancakes” (Friede, Freude, Pfannekuchen) as the German proverb goes: keep the peace, stay in your place, conform and life will be sweet. Moralistic treacle, but dressed up in witty enough garb that we swallowed it line, hook and sinker.

Or did we? I surely was equally drawn to the allure of Papageno, who withstood authority, acted out in strange ways, who had real problems pursuing a straight path of virtue. All these trials, all this non-linear unfolding of a life, made him into a very different person – maybe a better one, maybe just different. Stretches of submissiveness alternating with defiance could be the one sentence-description of my own life, finding myself alone, bursting with happiness, strength and adventure in a New World canyon in my late 60s, a million miles and years away from that little Old World girl in pain, being comforted by listening to Mozart.

He died at age 35. The Magic Flute was the last opera he composed, thrilled that it took off to great appreciation in the two months before he died, even though the tale is internally quite inconsistent, defying logic wherever you inspect it closely. But the music? Eternally thrilling.

35 was the average life expectancy of the Ancestral Pueblo people as well, felled by childbirth and diseases. My generation had vaccinations against polio and small pox, helping us on, my children benefited from inoculation against mumps and measles. Spared much suffering, let me tell you. It is incomprehensible to me how an anti-vax attitude has been able to take root in our current lives. In my darker moments I think it must be a combination of sadistic joy at the suffering of others, mixed with eugenic aspirations. More likely it is caused by forces smartly laid out in this short essay from last year’s Atlantic.

The montage consists of a photograph of the wooded oasis in Frijoles, luminous green matching the exuberance of the music. The superimposed bird catcher was a mural by street artists in Montreal, defying anti-tagging ordinances in solidarity with a non-conformist Papageno. Or so I fantasize.

Here is Papagenos’ aria from Act I of the Magic Flute.

Here is the full opera, a production by the MET with James Levine. (My favorite version is a 1990 production with the Vienna Philharmonic under Solti, but that is not available for free.)