Why Should I Go

“Why Should I Go” is the opening number of Queen of the Night, Paul Lorenz’s musical adaptation of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute). It stages the opera’s very first scene: Prince Tamino, hunted through the dark by a monstrous serpent, collapses unconscious in terror — and the Three Ladies of the Queen of the Night strike the creature down with their spears, only to fall under the spell of the sleeping prince they have just saved.

The scene: a prince, a serpent, three spears

Mozart wastes no time. Once the overture has burned itself out, the first thing an audience sees is a man running for his life. Tamino is a prince with nothing left but his legs — no weapon, no way back, and something enormous moving through the rocks behind him. He calls for help, he stumbles, and then, mid-sentence, the fear simply takes him. He falls unconscious, and the stage belongs to the serpent.

What arrives instead are three women. The Three Ladies, servants of the Queen of the Night, kill the creature with a single coordinated strike of their spears, and the danger is over almost before the audience has understood it. Then the music does the one thing a rescue scene is not supposed to do: it slows down. The three of them look at the man lying at their feet — and each decides, privately and at exactly the same moment, that she is not going to be the one to leave.

Where the title comes from

In Mozart’s original, the Ladies’ triumph collapses into an argument within seconds. One of them has to go and tell the Queen what has happened; none of them wants to. Why should I go? — each says it in turn, the reasons getting thinner and the courtesy getting sharper, until all three are still standing exactly where they were. It is the funniest moment in the first ten minutes of the opera, and the most human one, and it is where this song gets its name.

Paul Lorenz keeps the joke intact and pushes it through a contemporary theatre score: a driving rhythm section, orchestra underneath, three voices that begin in unison and end up circling one another. The comedy survives the translation because the situation was never really about a serpent.

The recording

The songs of Queen of the Night were recorded with West End singers at Abbey Road Studios in London — the same rooms in which Paul Lorenz has recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra. “Why Should I Go” is built the way the show is built: musical-theatre rhythm section, full orchestral bed, and vocal lines left exposed enough that you hear three distinct characters rather than a blended trio.

The player at the top of this page carries a 30-second preview. The complete track streams in lossless quality on Artyfile Stream.

Queen of the Night — the musical

Queen of the Night is a full-length musical adaptation of one of the most performed operas ever written. Twenty-three new songs by Paul Lorenz, a libretto by the director and translator Jeremy Sams, and the original story kept where it belongs — Tamino, Pamina, Papageno, Sarastro and the Queen — told for an audience that has never sat through an opera and for one that knows every bar.