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The Metropolitan staged a brilliant recovery at the Civic Opera house last night with a performance of "The Magic Flute," so stagewise, so musical, so effortlessly Mozartean that not even the illness of Ezio Pinza could dim enthusiasm. For one thing, Nicola Moscona stepped in to sing Sarastro with the noble serenity of fine presence, and with a big voice rich in quality and almost basso profundo in sonority. For another, the one man who could not have been spared was there. He was Bruno Walter, the great Bruno Walter, with tradition at his fingertips and youth in his heart, A superb conductor, a man of the theater, an operatic genius, Mr. Walter was concerned with just one thing, and that was to communicate Mozart.

For no matter what you say about opera, it begins and ends in the orchestra pit. Mr. Walter is simplicity itself. He doesn't storm, or rage, or strike fancy attitudes. He merely makes the music as lucid as light, and when that music happens to be Mozart at an operatic peak, the effect is breathtaking. The overture was a revelation in how an opera orchestra can sound, and the opera itself was a silken thing.

Almost without exception the singers were a delight. They could sing, they could sing in English, and you could understand the English. They were good enough to handle the arias, yet they worked together as harmoniously as the lion and the rabbit invoked by the magic flute. Mr. Brownlee's topnotch Papageno and Mr. Kullman's melodious Tamino were a fine pair with a new Pamina to rescue, pretty Nadine Conner, whose lyric soprano has radiance and luster. Their path was beset by a new Queen of the Night, Audrey Bowman, a bit less than menacing because the best she had to offer was a dainty coloratura.

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