Most of the operas Mozart produced in Vienna in the last decade of his life, including The Abduction from the Seraglio, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte, were premiered at the Burgtheater, the imperial court theater in the city center. The Magic Flute, by contrast, was produced at the Wiednertheater (also known as the Theater auf der Wieden), a private and commercial institution in the Viennese suburbs. The author of The Magic Flute’s libretto, Emanuel Schikaneder, was not only the Wiednertheater’s director, but also one of its greatest stars, as epitomized by the role of Papageno, which he created specifically for himself. Schikaneder became the director of the Wiednertheater in 1789, when he was approached by his ex-wife Eleonore Schikaneder after the death of Johann Friedel, her codirector and the Wiednertheater’s founder. Prior to his directorship at the Wiednertheater, Schikaneder led several theater troupes in Southern Germany and Austria, including in Augsburg, Regensburg, and at Vienna’s Kärntnertortheater. The Magic Flute’s libretto, therefore, reflects Schikaneder’s experience both with the German theater repertoire presented by regional theater companies in the 1770s and 1780s and with the conventions of the repertoire presented on Viennese commercial suburban stages around 1790. At the same time, the libretto reveals Mozart’s own sensibilities with respect to German-language theater and his wide-ranging experience with opera at the Vienna court theater.

To what extent Mozart himself may have contributed to the opera’s libretto is not entirely clear. What makes the search for Mozart’s textual contributions particularly problematic is how little is known about the libretto’s inception. In an effort to clarify the enormous richness of subjects and themes in The Magic Flute, many previous studies have explored literary and theatrical works that critics and scholars believe influenced the conception and construction of the libretto. Emphasis has also been placed on Mozart’s and Schikaneder’s personal involvement with Masonry and with the contemporaneous repertoire of the Viennese suburban theaters. A substantial literature attempts to identify the sources from which many specific elements in the libretto derive. At the same time, The Magic Flute appears distinct and original, in ways that emerge from its libretto, when compared to many of the works produced by court and commercial theaters of the period.

This essay focuses on The Magic Flute’s links to theatrical aesthetics of the Vienna court theater, as well as debates surrounding late eighteenth-century calls for the establishment of a German national theater tradition, and suggests that Schikaneder’s and Mozart’s experiences with the world of late eighteenth-century German theater traditions shaped The Magic Flute’s libretto significantly. At the end, I will attempt to show that Mozart’s contributions to Schikaneder’s libretto in fact enhance the work’s status as both a culmination of decades-long debates about German national theater and a harbinger of a future course for German national opera.¹

German National Theater Reform

The Magic Flute’s libretto reflects numerous ideas that German theorists had been debating since the 1730s in connection with a reform of the national theater. Among the many contexts for understanding the libretto, this may be one of the most important. Mid-eighteenth-century German aestheticians, such as Johann Christoph Gottsched, wanted to raise German theater to the level of the theatrical traditions of other countries, especially France and Italy. To achieve this end, German playwrights focused on works that were fully written out (as opposed to partially improvised), adhered to the principles of French neoclassical drama (such as the Aristotelian unities), and were both morally upright and didactic. One of the goals of the German reformers was to gain financial backing from German states and principalities in order to make German works more competitive with Italian and French operas and dramas, which represented the main fare at most German court theaters in the early 1700s. Through a repertoire of didactic national works, German intellectuals wanted both to transform German audiences into cultivated and well-behaved subjects and to express emerging notions of German national uniqueness (or moral superiority).²

Schikaneder and Mozart were both well versed in this tradition. Prior to taking over the directorship of the Wiednertheater in the fall of 1789, Schikaneder had directed German theater companies in various cities that produced elevated German dramas, including works by Goethe and Lessing. Schikaneder’s own spoken and musical dramas also subscribed to reformist viewpoints.³ Mozart, too, participated in this cultural movement and famously expressed support for German national opera in his letter of February 5, 1783, to Leopold Mozart: “Every nation has its own opera and why not Germany? Is not German as singable as French and English? Is it not more so than Russian?”⁴ Several of the works that scholars cite as important sources for The Magic Flute’s libretto in fact originated within the tradition of German reform drama. Most prominent among these is Tobias Philipp von Gebler’s play Thamos, König in Ägypten (Thamos, King of Egypt), which premiered at the Vienna court theater (the Burgtheater) in April 1774. Like The Magic Flute, this play involves a conflict between a benevolent high priest/king (Sethos, a deposed Egyptian king) and a power-hungry, manipulative, and cruel priestess (Mirza), who stabs herself when she realizes her evil plan to help her nephew (Pheron) usurp the throne of Egypt has failed. Thamos certainly belongs to the tradition of German reform drama because of its elevated plot and didactic ending (the evil characters die, the virtuous ones are rewarded, and righteous behavior is exalted and commented upon throughout the play).

For Gebler’s play, Mozart wrote three choruses and five instrumental numbers (four interludes and one postlude). Early versions of two of Mozart’s three choruses were performed as part of the first production of Gebler’s play at the Vienna Burgtheater in 1774.⁵ Mozart revised these two choruses, added a third one, and wrote the instrumental music sometime between 1775 and 1780.⁶ Unfortunately, we do not know for certain for which performance this additional incidental music was intended. The similarity between Thamos and The Magic Flute led early twentieth-century Schikaneder biographer Egon Komorzynski to speculate that Mozart revised and expanded the Thamos music for a production by Schikaneder’s itinerant troupe, which performed in Salzburg between September 17, 1780 and February 27, 1781.⁷ Since there is no record of a Schikaneder production of Thamos in Salzburg, however, later scholars connected Mozart’s revision to the documented Salzburg performance of the play with an unspecified composer’s music by Karl Wahr’s company on January 3, 1776.⁸ Whether it was performed by Schikaneder’s or Wahr’s company, Mozart’s Thamos music does illustrate the composer’s exposure to and artistic interactions with German reform drama in the 1770s. We know from a letter to his father of February 15, 1783, that Mozart thought well of this work and was disappointed when the national company in Vienna refused to perform Gebler’s Thamos, and thus his choruses and interludes.⁹

Although Thamos quickly disappeared from German stages, Mozart’s choruses and interludes were eventually repurposed for Karl Martin Plümicke’s Lanassa, another reform German drama. Lanassa was performed throughout the 1780s by the troupe of Johann Böhm, including during Mozart’s visit to Salzburg in September and October 1783.¹⁰ According to a poster dating from September 17, 1790, Böhm’s troupe performed Lanassa with Mozart’s choruses and interludes in Frankfurt, and Mozart may have attended a performance during his visit to the city for the coronation of Leopold II.¹¹ Like many German dramas of the 1770s and 1780s, Lanassa contains elements that clearly prefigure The Magic Flute: The exotic plot takes places in an unspecified Indian port and is filled with depictions of religious rites; the drama’s main theme is the criticism of religious fanaticism and human sacrifice (the main heroine’s much older husband dies and she is supposed to be burnt alive on his funeral pyre). The most prominent connection to The Magic Flute is the claim of the main hero, General Montalban, that he is no conqueror but simply a human (“Kein Überwinder bin ich, ich bin ein Mensch”), which prefigures the Speaker’s and Sarastro’s statements that Tamino is not just a prince but a human (Speaker: “Er ist Prinz.” Sarastro: “Noch mehr – er ist Mensch!”).¹²

In Vienna, the most powerful endorsement of the reformist movement occurred in 1776, when Emperor Joseph II transformed the court theater into a National Theater devoted solely to presenting German spoken plays; the German opera troupe, or National Singspiel, was added in 1778. Shortly after his move to Vienna, Mozart became involved with the National Singspiel, for which he composed The Abduction from the Seraglio, which premiered in 1782. In two famous letters to his father dating from the fall of 1781, Mozart provides numerous details about his working relationship with Viennese playwright Gottlieb Stephanie the Younger on The Abduction’s libretto. For example, Mozart asked Stephanie to reorder the musical numbers and rework the plot, which led to the creation of a new, moralistic finale at the end of the second act.¹³ It is possible (likely, even) that Mozart was similarly involved in the inception and development of The Magic Flute’s libretto. The libretto of The Abduction in many ways prefigures that of The Magic Flute, particularly in its reformist intensity (the opera presents exemplary actions that are explicitly promoted by text and music) and its variety of styles (a libretto that combines simple, strophic songs with more complex arias; a quartet resembling an Italian comic opera finale; and a vaudeville conclusion akin to those in contemporary French opéra comique).¹⁴

After Joseph II decided to replace the National Singspiel with an Italian opera company in 1783, German opera in Vienna moved into the hands of private entrepreneurs. Remnants of the reformist attitude toward opera was at times rekindled at the state-supervised Kärntnertortheater, which was rented out to private theater companies and for a brief period (1785–88) accommodated a variant of the court-supported National Singspiel.¹⁵ At the request of Joseph II, Schikaneder became one of the temporary tenants at the Kärntnertortheater between November 5, 1784 and January 6, 1785, and during his brief stay in Vienna his company featured numerous German operatic works originally introduced by the National Singspiel. He even opened his brief Viennese stagione with The Abduction.¹⁶ Before returning to Vienna in 1789, Schikaneder traveled through various parts of Southern Germany, and his longest director position was in Regensburg (between February 1787 and August 1789), where he featured both The Abduction and Lanassa.¹⁷ German reform drama therefore represents a crucial context for Schikaneder’s and Mozart’s work on the libretto for The Magic Flute.

Fairy-Tale Operas in the Viennese Suburbs

In creating the libretto for The Magic Flute, Schikaneder also drew from a number of magical, fairy-tale operas that were particularly popular with the Viennese public. Such works were already prominent in the repertoire of the National Singspiel and its Kärntnertortheater variant. Among the most popular ones were the Viennese German adaptation of André Grétry’s Zemire et Azor (1778), Ignaz Umlauf’s Das Irrlicht (Will-o’-the-Wisp, 1782), and Joseph Martin Ruprecht’s Das wütende Heer (The Wild Army, 1787). But it was the suburban operatic repertoire that had the most direct influence on The Magic Flute’s libretto. German opera flourished in commercial theaters that began appearing after 1776 in the Viennese suburbs. In the late 1780s and early 1790s, productions of magical operas shifted to the Leopoldstadt Theater and, after Schikaneder’s assumption of the directorship there, also to the Wiednertheater.

A particularly important prototype of Viennese magical, fairy-tale opera is Oberon, König der Elfen, premiered by Schikaneder’s troupe on November 11, 1789, with a libretto by Wiednertheater actor and playwright Karl Ludwig Giesecke and music by Paul Wranitzky. For the Viennese Oberon, Giesecke adapted (or, according to some commentators, plagiarized) the North German text written in 1788 and published in 1789 by the actress Friederike Sophie Seyler, who in turn based her work on Christoph Martin Wieland’s 1780 epic poem Oberon. In his revision, Giesecke executed many changes that closely resemble those found in earlier Viennese librettos that also adapt preexisting texts (such as Stephanie’s libretto for The Abduction). Wranitzky was no doubt closely familiar with these earlier Viennese operas, since in the late 1780s he served as the orchestral director, first at the Kärntnertortheater during the National Singspiel revival, and later at the Burgtheater. Giesecke reduced passages of spoken dialogue and the number of arias, ultimately allowing for fewer but longer musical numbers (with more of a sense of contrast): the first act of Seyler’s original libretto, for example, features two arias for both the Papageno-like servant Scherasmin and the Tamino-like hero Hüon, whereas the corresponding first act of Giesecke’s text features only one aria for each, allowing for greater stylistic distinction.¹⁸ Giesecke also created numerous ensembles, either from Seyler’s solo numbers or from her dialogues. At the very beginning, for example, Giesecke transforms a spoken monologue and an aria for Scherasmin into an introductory multisectional action duet for Scherasmin and Hüon, in which Scherasmin complains about his lonely existence in the woods (where he retired after the death of his master, Hüon’s father), is scared by the approaching Hüon (whom he mistakes for the bringer of death), and then hides and is discovered by Hüon. Also commensurate with Viennese German libretto adaptation is Giesecke’s creation of multisectional finales for the first and second acts. Just as in The Abduction and other Viennese works from the National Singspiel era, Giesecke’s finales alternate musical dialogue with moments of reflection, which are often moralistic.¹⁹ In the first-act finale, for instance, Oberon exhorts Hüon to be brave and virtuous, and Hüon promises to be just that. Oberon then addresses a group of dervishes, whom he had earlier punished for religious hypocrisy, urging them to be true to their religious beliefs. As Oberon flies away, the finale concludes with a section in which Hüon, Scherasmin, and the dervishes celebrate Oberon, thank him for his “teachings,” and promise to devote themselves to virtue. The finales of Oberon and its Viennese predecessors likely served as models for the finales of The Magic Flute, where passages of dialogue alternate with communal, reflective (and often moralistic) moments. Many passages come to mind: the first-act finale opens with the Three Boys preaching virtue to Tamino, and the second-act finale opens with an episode in which the Three Boys prevent Pamina from stabbing herself. Mozart usually introduces striking shifts in tempo, dynamics, and style to emphasize these maxims – in particular, he often employs the pastoral style in connection with moralistic and utopian ideas.²⁰

Following the production of Oberon, Schikaneder’s company produced several magical operas, which recent studies have identified as the closest precursors of, and models for, The Magic Flute libretto. Many of these works were heavily indebted to another work of Wieland’s (written in collaboration with his son-in-law, J. A. Liebeskind): the three volumes of fairy tales titled Dschinnistan, published between 1786 and 1789. Three musical works based on Dschinnistan premiered in Vienna in the seasons leading up to The Magic Flute. The earliest one, Der Stein der Weisen, oder Die Zauberinsel (The Philosopher’s Stone, or The Magic Island), premiered a little over a year after Oberon, on November 11, 1790, with a libretto by Schikaneder. The work became particularly prominent in 1996, after musicologist David Buch found that a manuscript score of Der Stein der Weisen, newly returned to the Hamburg State and University Library from Russia, contained attributions of two segments of the second-act finale to Mozart. (Even before this discovery, the second-act duet “Nun liebes Weibchen” [K. 625] had been generally considered Mozart’s work because of the existence of a partial autograph).²¹ Der wohltätige Derwisch, oder Die Schellenkappe (The Beneficent Dervish, or The Fool’s Cap) was also composed to a text by Schikaneder by a collection of composers. Premiered in early 1791, just a few months before The Magic Flute, its musical numbers are not as extensive as those in Der Stein der Weisen. This is reflected in its genre designation: Whereas surviving printed librettos referred to Der Stein der Weisen as “eine heroisch-komische Oper” (a heroic-comic opera), Der wohltätige Derwisch was designated a “Lust- und Zauberspiel” (comedic and magical play). (The third Dschinnistan opera was Kaspar der Fagottist, oder Die Zauberzither and will be discussed in the section below.)

Composed by the same author for the same company and theater, the texts of Der Stein der Weisen and Der wohltätige Derwisch share numerous similarities with The Magic Flute. All three works are infused with aspects of the Dschinnistan tales, including supernatural elements, magical objects, religious ceremonies, exotic settings, princely couples accompanied by comical servant ones, and wise, Sarastro-like figures. Scholars have identified numerous elements of The Magic Flute’s libretto that originated in the tales of Dschinnistan, one of which was in fact titled “Lulu, oder Die Zauberflöte” (Lulu, or The Magic Flute). Other characters and plot devices Schikaneder most likely derived from Dschinnistan include the Three Boys (“Die klugen Knaben” [The Clever Boys], volume III, story 3); the tests of flood and fire and the ancient Egyptian setting (“Der Stein der Weisen,” volume I, story 4); a villainous slave who spies on the heroine and is punished rather than rewarded for it (“Adis und Dahy,” volume I, story 2); and a hero who falls in love with the heroine’s portrait (“Neangir und seine Bruder” [Neangir and his Brothers], volume I, story 3).²² Whereas the German reform drama represents an important general context for the libretto of The Magic Flute, many specific elements of the opera were clearly derived from fairy-tale Singspiele of the Viennese suburban theaters and late eighteenth-century fairy-tale literature.²³

Suburban Subversion and Parody

To fully understand The Magic Flute libretto, we must consider both how it resembles and how it differs from the works that immediately preceded it in the suburban theaters. Der Stein der Weisen and Der wohltätige Derwisch served as models in some respects; however, they do present a slightly different tone from The Magic Flute in that they partially abandon the reformist zeal that characterized the German reform repertoire at the Viennese National Theater. In these pre-Magic Flute works, Schikaneder seems to reference works produced at the Leopoldstadt Theater, his main competitor in Vienna at this time. According to Buch, the Leopoldstadt Theater started producing a lot of magical works after 1784, and this trend continued into the 1790s.²⁴ The aesthetic principles pursued in these works differed substantially, however, from those at the National Theater. The Leopoldstadt Theater to a large extent continued the traditions of earlier Viennese popular theater. Although Leopoldstadt plays were no longer improvised, as was the case throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, they still contained risqué humor, coarse language, and often engaged in parodies of more serious dramas. These elements often centered around the stock character of a comical male servant figure, called Hanswurst in the early part of the eighteenth century and Kaspar (or Kasperl) in the Leopoldstadt productions.²⁵

One Leopoldstadt opera with coarse comedy that scholars have cited as related in content to The Magic Flute is Das Sonnenfest der Braminen (The Brahmins’ Sun Festival), an exotic opera with a plot related to that of The Abduction, which premiered on September 9, 1790. Several scenes of Das Sonnenfest explicitly ridicule elevated situations from reform dramas, such as Lanassa. The plots of both works center on righteous Europe and heroes who rescue heroines in distress from either a harem (Das Sonnenfest) or an inhumane religious ritual (Lanassa). But the Leopoldstadt work upends the virtuous borrowed plot. In Lanassa, the European hero is aided by the long-lost brother of the heroine, who, even before recognizing his relationship to the heroine, decides to save her for humanistic reasons (“Menschenliebe”). In Das Sonnenfest, by contrast, the main hero is nearly seduced by his long-lost sister in a suggestive duet.²⁶

The same irreverent ethos dominates another pre-Mozart Dschinnistan opera, Kaspar der Fagottist, oder Die Zauberzither (Kaspar the Bassoonist, or The Magic Zither), premiered at the Leopoldstadt Theater on June 8, 1791.²⁷ In the nineteenth century, this work became a source of yet another controversy surrounding The Magic Flute’s libretto: in an 1841 article, Friedrich Treitschke suggested that after the premiere of Kaspar der Fagottist Mozart and Schikaneder transformed the initially sympathetic Queen of the Night into a villainess to avoid replicating the plot of this Leopoldstadt opera, which featured a sympathetic fairy queen Perifirime. This theory is generally discredited nowadays.²⁸ The operas do share numerous features, including a prominent use of “magic” instruments. This particular shared feature, however, illustrates the different aesthetics guiding the two works. In The Magic Flute, Tamino’s flute and Papageno’s magic bells tame wild animals, give Tamino and Pamina encouragement and strength at crucial moments, and pacify Monostatos and his crew. The opera’s celebration of music’s ethical powers creates a connection to the Orpheus story, the subject of numerous operas and ballets featured at court theaters in Vienna and elsewhere.²⁹ Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, which premiered in Vienna in 1762, became the most celebrated representative of this elevated type of court opera; it was performed several times at the National Theater in 1782 and 1783. Der Fagottist, by contrast, ridicules rather than emulates the Orpheus myth and opera seria.³⁰ Der Fagottist’s counterpart to the magic flute is a magic zither presented by Perifirime to Tamino-like Prince Armidoro, but it is mainly used in various amorous adventures. Even less like its Magic Flute counterpart is the eponymous magic bassoon. Throughout the opera it is associated with sexual innuendo, such as when Kaspar uses it to impress the servant Palmire or when he complains about his broken “Blasinstrument” (blowing horn) after returning from a tryst with Palmire. Also peculiar is the duet in which Kaspar gives a bassoon lesson to the Monostatos-like character Zumio, in which quite explicit references to oral sex abound.³¹

Elements of similar fairground humor, quite distant from the preferences of German reformists, can also be found in Der Stein der Weisen and other magical operas by Schikaneder and his team. For example, Der Stein der Weisen plays humorously with the topic of marital infidelity when it presents how the evil magician Eutifronte abducts the Papagena-like character Lubanara, who was earlier heard praising infidelity in an aria, and places a pair of gilded antlers (a prominent symbol of cuckoldry) on the head of Lubano, the Papageno-like husband of Lubanara. Schikaneder and his compositional team further ridicule Lubano’s unhappy marriage by bringing in a chorus of hunters, who mistake Lubano for a stag and chase him around.

Reformist Qualities of The Magic Flute’s Libretto

Even though The Magic Flute libretto emerged from, and is closely associated with, the world of Viennese popular suburban theater, it differs from that tradition significantly in that it mainly avoids the parodistic elements featured in the Leopoldstadt operas and Schikaneder’s other Wiednertheater librettos, such as Der Stein der Weisen. In fact, a few scenes in The Magic Flute appear to engage Der Stein der Weisen directly in a moralistic dialogue. For example, the padlock the Three Ladies place on Papageno to punish him for pretending to be the killer of the serpent that threatened Tamino at the beginning of the opera has a parallel in the padlock that Lubano places on the door of his cabin to prevent the unfaithful Lubanara from meeting other men. But such parallels also point to ways in which the librettos of these operas differ significantly. In Der Stein der Weisen, the locking of the door occurs within a duet for Lubano and Lubanara (No. 5, “Tralleralara! Tralleralara!”), and the two characters react to it with a communal utterance of nonsensical syllables: “Mum, mum! Dideldum!” In The Magic Flute, the first-act quintet (No. 5, “Hm! Hm! Hm!”) begins with the unlocking of Papageno’s padlock and then leads to a communal statement, a maxim that explains the moralistic significance of the episode:

Mozart launches the maxim with the musical phrase that introduced the nonsensical reflection in Der Stein der Weisen, as if he wanted to point out the striking difference between the neglect of the padlock’s moralistic potential in the earlier work and the didactic significance of the maxim in the later opera.

The attention to communal, moralizing statements in The Magic Flute exemplifies calls for such statements in German reformist theater criticism of the time. For example, a 1789 essay in the Kritisches Theater-Journal von Wien complains that Karl Friedrich Hensler’s Leopoldstadt play Das Glück ist kugelrund, oder Kasperls Ehrentag (Happiness is Fickle, or Kaspar’s Day of Honor, premiered on February 17, 1789) does not present clear moral truths and should not be performed any longer; according to the critic, only fairy-tale works with clear moral statements are worthy of presentation.³² The Magic Flute’s libretto is governed by ideas similar to those expressed in the critique, as demonstrated by an actual link to the quite popular Das Glück ist kugelrund.³³ In both works, characters attempt to commit suicide by hanging themselves. In Hensler’s play, Kasperl’s suicide attempt leads to magical comedy: first, when the ladder that he climbs to reach a tree branch disappears; and second, when a door with a nail to hold the noose transforms into a cloud from which a fairy appears to tell him she is bringing him happiness.³⁴ In the second-act finale of The Magic Flute, Papageno is prevented from hanging himself by the Three Boys who, unlike Hensler’s fairy, draw a moralistic warning from the situation: “Stop, Papageno! And be smart! / Life is lived only once, let that be sufficient for you.” (“Halt ein, o Papageno! und sey klug. / Man lebt nur einmal, dies sey dir genug.”)

The subtle, yet significant, differences between The Magic Flute and its most immediate predecessors (the fairy-tale operas of Schikaneder and the Leopoldstadt authors) bring us back to the question of Mozart’s involvement in the libretto’s production. The opera’s adherence to the principles of a reformed, didactic German national theater contrasts with most other Schikaneder librettos from the Wiednertheater era, and this in turn suggests that Mozart may have been responsible for the difference. That Schikaneder would be willing to make concessions to Mozart’s suggestions about the overall aesthetic character of the libretto is not surprising, since, compared to the other composers working for the suburban theaters in Vienna, Mozart was an international celebrity. Mozart was also the first composer writing for the Viennese suburban stage who also had experience with both the National Theater and the court theater in Vienna. In the works created with his long-term creative team, Schikaneder seems to be concerned about competing with the parodistic and risqué productions at the Leopoldstadt Theater and heeding the principle, which he himself mentioned in prefaces to his own works, that morals and reformist uprightness are not good for the box office of his commercial institution.³⁵ However, in his collaboration with Mozart, Schikaneder clearly emphasizes elements associated with genres, such as the German reform drama and opera seria, produced predominantly by state- or court-supported institutions. This includes engaging in moralizing statements, especially on the part of Sarastro and the Priests. Some of these statements are reprehensible – among the most straightforwardly racist or sexist utterances in all of eighteenth-century opera – and are usually censored in present-day productions of The Magic Flute, although we can assume that they were widely accepted in the eighteenth century. These statements, however, do contribute to the unique quality of the opera’s libretto and its combination of aesthetic viewpoints associated with suburban, commercial, and popular theatrical traditions on the one hand, and reformist, national, state- and court-sponsored traditions on the other.

The Magic Flute is a notoriously complex work that accommodates a large number of different theatrical and musical styles. The opera’s connection to the ideals of German reform drama is particularly significant, because it illustrates that even within the confines of a private, commercial theater Mozart and Schikaneder aimed at the creation of a high-minded work. In the handwritten list of his compositions, Mozart famously referred to The Magic Flute as a “teutsche Oper” (German opera), an unusual designation since the titles of most other contemporary Viennese operas referred to the works’ dramaturgical features, not their language or national character (e.g., heroisch-komische Oper or lustiges Singspiel). The resonance between The Magic Flute and the moralistic concepts of German national theater suggests that the designation might have had a symbolic meaning – that for Mozart The Magic Flute, with its didacticism, represented a truly German national work.