When Mozart sat down to write the finales to The Magic Flute, how did he know what to do?

The question may seem absurd, since we are talking about someone now widely regarded as the greatest opera composer of the eighteenth century, and one of the greatest of all time. Yet, Mozart’s operatic compositions for the previous nine years – since the completion of Die Entführung aus dem Serail in 1782 – had been almost entirely Italian, including, most importantly, the three opere buffe he wrote with Lorenzo Da Ponte: Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte. And Die Entführung, though one of Mozart’s greatest successes, was typical of the Singspiel of its day in lacking the extended, multisectional finales that the composer created for The Magic Flute. His one-act Der Schauspieldirektor of 1786, written to represent German opera in a special competition between the Italian and German companies, was more of a play with music and contained a relatively brief finale in a single movement.

Mozart was not the only one focused on Italian opera since 1782. With the abandoning of Emperor Joseph’s National Singspiel project and the reinstallation of an opera buffa company in 1783, the court theaters in Vienna had been producing Italian comic opera almost exclusively for most of the decade. Even after the brief restoration of the German troupe in 1785 and despite the great success of two German works by Dittersdorf, Der Apotheker und der Doktor (1786) and Die Liebe im Narrenhause (1787), opera in German generally took a back seat to opera buffa in Vienna, at least at the imperial theaters (the Burgtheater and the Kärntnertortheater).¹

It was chiefly at commercial suburban theaters in the later 1780s that a popular Singspiel repertory began to develop. In particular, the Theater auf der Wieden, where Emanuel Schikaneder became director in 1789, presented two series of Singspiele with enormous success. One was a set of farces about the “two Antons,” starting in July 1789 with Der dumme Gärtner aus dem Gebürge oder Die zween Anton, and continuing with six more operas about the Antons in the next six years.

Schikaneder’s other series was a succession of fairy-tale operas. It began with Paul Wranitzky’s Oberon in September 1789; continued with a group of collaboratively composed operas, including, most importantly, Der Stein der Weisen oder Die Zauberinsel (September 1790); and led to Schikaneder and Mozart’s The Magic Flute in September 1791 and beyond.² As David Buch and others have shown, Mozart – already a longtime friend of Schikaneder’s – was well acquainted with the operatic activity at the Theater auf der Wieden and in fact composed portions of Der Stein der Weisen, including parts of one of the finales.³

Some, though not all, of the operas in these two series contained the lengthy, multisectional finales that were the hallmark of opera buffa – and that Mozart created for The Magic Flute. And while The Magic Flute finales owe much to the standard model that Mozart drew upon in creating the finales of his Da Ponte operas, they also show features that do not stem from the typical practices of finales in the opera buffa repertory. As we shall see, many of these features can be clearly seen in the finales of Schikaneder’s earlier Singspiele at the Theater auf der Wieden.

In his discussion of The Magic Flute, Hermann Abert claimed that its finales have “absolutely nothing in common with a typical Italian opera buffa finale.”⁴ Yet, in several respects, the two finales of The Magic Flute are not so different from those that Mozart composed for the three Da Ponte operas, which are in turn representative of the finales written for Italian opere buffe in Vienna in the 1780s. On the contrary, the similarities are hard to miss.

To begin with, the finales of The Magic Flute are “chain finales,” meaning that they comprise a succession of ensemble (or, occasionally, solo) sections in a series of tempos, meters, and keys. Mozart’s finales in the Da Ponte operas contain between eight and twelve musical sections and run between 521 and 939 measures, with an average of about 725. In performance they last between sixteen and twenty-four minutes. The Magic Flute finales fit this pattern (they are 586 and 920 measures long, respectively), although the longer Act 2 finale has fifteen musical sections and typically takes twenty-nine or thirty minutes to perform, making it the longest finale Mozart ever composed (see Table 11.1).⁵

Like the Da Ponte opera finales, those of The Magic Flute are musically continuous, never interrupted by passages of simple recitative, and the home keys of their successive sections move away from the initial tonic key of the finale, only to return to the tonic at the end.⁶ Moreover, and again like the finales of opera buffa, the individual movements rely both on passages in which the dramatic action moves forward – typically involving dialogue among the characters onstage – and on expressive passages, in which, for the most part, all characters sing together.⁷ These expressive passages slow the pace of the drama, allowing the characters to reflect on, or express their feelings about, what has just taken place. And they tend to be the moments of greatest musical richness in each section, as multiple voices take over from preceding passages sung mostly in dialogue. A clear example in the Act 2 finale of The Magic Flute is the passage sung by Pamina and the Three Boys in measures 146–82: after they have prevented her suicide and promised to lead her to Tamino, all sing together in praise of “two hearts that burn with love for one another.”

If the structural similarities between The Magic Flute finales and the finales of opera buffa are readily apparent, though, the differences are also highly significant. And nearly all of them can be connected to the new, distinctly different traditions reflected in the German operas being produced by Schikaneder at the Theater auf der Wieden.

In characterizing Der Stein der Weisen as an important model for The Magic Flute and the fairy-tale operas that followed, David Buch listed a number of the work’s stylistic features, the most relevant here being his characterization of its finales. In his words, they were “conceived as a series of contrasting episodes with magic scenes, comic episodes, and tableaus with solemn, ceremonial (feierlich) expression; this structure necessitated a quickly changing mixture of ensembles, solos, recitatives, instrumental music, and choruses.”⁸

To a great extent – and not surprisingly – Buch’s description of the finales of Der Stein der Weisen fits the finales of The Magic Flute as well. We may trace three differences of special interest between Mozart’s finales for The Magic Flute and those for his Da Ponte operas. The differences arise for various reasons, but each connects directly to Buch’s account of the finales of Der Stein der Weisen. One difference is the need for ceremonial, quasi-religious or magical scenes, which are central to the story of The Magic Flute (and others in Schikaneder’s series of fairy-tale operas) but play no part in the more human comedy of opere buffe.⁹ Another is the greater attention to sets and set changes in Schikaneder’s scenically lavish productions. A third is a looser, more episodic approach to the construction of a finale, which corresponds to the more episodic structure of Schikaneder’s libretto for The Magic Flute. In what follows I consider each of these differences in turn.

1. 1. The feierlich (solemn or ceremonial) style was a hallmark of the fairy-tale opera at the Theater auf der Wieden, beginning with Wranitzky’s highly successful Oberon. As in The Magic Flute, it was not limited to finales but employed for formal and ceremonial scenes throughout the operas.¹⁰

Strikingly, many of the feierlich numbers, both in The Magic Flute and in the other fairy-tale operas, are marches. The March of the Priests that opens Act 2 of The Magic Flute is one such example, as are the two marchlike numbers for the Three Boys that begin each of The Magic Flute’s finales. These three pieces share a cut-time time signature, a tempo of andante or larghetto, a reliance on dotted rhythms (a bit less so in the March of the Priests), and a sense of nobility and gravity. While they are otherwise scored quite differently, two of the three pieces employ trombones – as does another conspicuously feierlich piece, Sarastro’s aria “O Isis und Osiris.”¹¹

Beyond the two marches that begin The Magic Flute’s finales, there are also other references to the feierlich style in each finale. In the Act 1 finale, three short passages occur at the end of the lengthy scene between Tamino and the Priest (mm. 137–39, 143–45, and 149–51). As Tamino asks three questions about when Enlightenment will reach him and whether Pamina is still alive, he is answered – first by the Priest, and in the second and third passages by an offstage chorus of Priests – by the same grave, solemn, marchlike phrase in A minor, in an andante tempo with dotted rhythms. (Here, as in so many other places in the opera, the use of a three-fold repetition is symbolic rather than incidental.)¹²

The feierlich style is even more prominent in the Act 2 finale. In addition to the opening march for the Three Boys, there is the impressive passage in which the two Armored Men sing a chorale melody (this passage is discussed further below); there are the two flute solos with which Tamino and Pamina brave the trials of fire and water – though perhaps a bit more cheerful and lively than some of the other feierlich scenes, these passages still rely on the same dotted rhythms and march topos – and the closing chorus of the opera, which begins with a grand Andante march of praise (mm. 828–45) before giving way to the final celebratory Allegro.

1. 2. Schikaneder’s operatic productions of German opera at the Theater auf der Wieden, as John Rice and others have noted, were considerably more lavish than productions at the Burgtheater, where “scenery was not a high priority for Emperor Joseph II and his theater director Rosenberg.”¹³ For example, Rice showed that Da Ponte’s libretto for Don Giovanni calls for nine sets during the work’s two acts, two of them reused in each act, so that seven different sets in all would have been needed. (While Don Giovanni was originally conceived for the Nostitz Theater in Prague, the settings remained the same for the 1788 production at the Burgtheater.) By contrast, The Magic Flute libretto calls for thirteen sets, no fewer than nine of them in the second act alone (with only one of those reused, so that eight different sets – one more than in Don Giovanni – would have been employed in the act).¹⁴ More generally, Buch notes that “Schikaneder’s librettos for the theater [auf der Wieden] specify a mechanical stage with three trap doors, movable flats and backdrops, and devices to accommodate flying machines, storms, sea battles, and similar effects.”¹⁵

The relative economy of set changes in the Da Ponte operas is notable in their finales, all but one of which use a single set throughout. Only in the Act 1 finale of Don Giovanni is there a change, from the garden outside Don Giovanni’s palace to a great hall within. But while the first finale of The Magic Flute occurs entirely in a single location – the grove with three temples in which Tamino first learns of Sarastro’s brotherhood – the second finale uses four distinct scenes (see Table 11.1). The first and third of these are the same “short garden” – that is, a garden scene that uses only the front portion of the stage, so that stagehands can work behind a cloth backdrop to prepare the full-stage set that will be used next.¹⁶ In the first garden scene, the Three Boys confront and comfort Pamina; in the later one, Papageno contemplates suicide, is reminded by the Boys to use his magic bells to summon Papagena, and is blissfully reunited with her. The same set remains for the subsequent section in which the Queen of the Night and her retinue reappear, bent on revenge. (While some modern scores indicate, and some productions employ, a change of scene for the Queen’s entrance, it is quite clear in the original libretto that no change of scene occurs.)

These two short-set episodes permitted the preparation of the two impressive full-stage sets. The first contains “two great mountains,” one with a waterfall, the other with a fire burning; this is of course the setting for the two trials that Tamino and Pamina must endure. In the second full-stage scene, which appears only for the final moments of the opera, “the entire theater is transformed into a sun,” as the Queen and her entourage sink down into the floor, and Sarastro and his followers celebrate the courage and virtue of Tamino and Pamina.

1. 3. It is in their episodic nature that Mozart’s Magic Flute finales most clearly diverge from the model of the opera buffa finale, one of whose hallmarks is dramatic continuity. In an opera buffa, a finale follows a set of characters through a single sequence of connected plot events. A clear example is the Act 1 finale of Così fan tutte, in which the pretended suicide attempt by the two male lovers sets up the series of comic scenes that follows, with all six characters involved. Dramatic continuity is maintained in all of the Da Ponte opera finales by the presence throughout of some of the central characters, while others may come and go.

The sense of an episodic finale, on the other hand – what Abert described as “a lively array of scenes … loosely held together by the thread of the plot”¹⁷ – arises from points at which all the characters on stage exit, to be replaced by others involved in another aspect of the story, giving a sense of “meanwhile …” It can be heightened by a set change, which strengthens the separation between two successive scenes.

Only once does either of these devices occur in any of the Da Ponte opera finales. Both instances take place in the Act 1 finale of Don Giovanni, whose main focus is Giovanni’s attempt to seduce Zerlina during the festivities to which he has invited her wedding party. As mentioned above, the finale begins in Don Giovanni’s garden. After Giovanni leads his guests inside (i.e., offstage), the trio of Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, and Don Ottavio appear in the garden, bent on confronting him. At Don Giovanni’s order, Leporello calls to them from the window to invite them inside. As the scene changes to the “illuminated room” in the palace, they join the rest of the characters for the remainder of the finale.

The moment of the three maskers’ entrance does create the feeling of a separate episode (which, as I have said, is atypical of an opera buffa finale). However, the end of the scene has the opposite effect: when the set changes to the interior of Don Giovanni’s palace and the three masked figures join Don Giovanni’s party, they converge back into the main dramatic flow of the finale. The set change does not further contribute to an episodic feeling; on the contrary, it emphasizes the convergence.

A similar succession of events – a complete change of characters, followed by a convergence – occurs once in the Act 1 finale of The Magic Flute: Tamino, aided by the Three Boys, searches for Pamina. After his lengthy conversation with the Priest – seen by many scholars as the central “conversion moment” of the opera – he plays his flute, leading to a musical exchange between the flute and Papageno’s pipes. Tamino rushes off to find Papageno, hoping to find Pamina as well, just as they enter in search of him. After the subsequent scene with Monostatos and his Slaves, Pamina and Papageno are discovered by Sarastro and his brotherhood; they are then joined by Monostatos, who brings with him the captured Tamino, thus uniting all the characters for the closing portion of the finale.

It is in the Act 2 finale of The Magic Flute that the episodic, “meanwhile …” nature of the Singspiel finale described by Buch and Abert can be seen most clearly: there are no fewer than five phases of action with different groups of characters onstage – that is, when one entire group of characters exits and another enters. (Again, and as we have seen, such a wholesale change occurs only once in any of Mozart’s Da Ponte opera finales.) And the use of multiple stage sets heightens the sense of separation between these parts of the finale.

As mentioned above, finale 2 opens in a “short garden” in which the Three Boys discuss Pamina’s plight and then comfort her, promising to guide her to Tamino (see sections 1–2 in Table 11.1). What follows is something never found in any of Mozart’s opera buffa finales: a complete change of scene, characters, and mood. As Pamina and the Three Boys exit, the set changes to the two mountains. The new episode begins with an utterly different feeling: the two Armored Men escort Tamino and sing a solemn prophecy about his path to Enlightenment – a brilliant, feierlich evocation of a Bachian chorale prelude and one of the most stunning musical moments in the finale, if not the entire opera.¹⁸ Tamino is soon joined by Pamina, and he plays the flute as the couple brave the trials of fire and water; at the conclusion of the trials, their triumph is confirmed by an offstage chorus (sections 3–7).

What follows is the most clearly self-contained episode of the finale, marked by a set change back to the garden: Papageno’s scene in which his attempt at suicide is prevented by the Three Boys, leading to his reunion with Papagena (sections 8–12). The story arc of the bird-couple concludes there, and they have no further role in the events of the opera; there is no reunion of master and sidekick as one might have expected for Tamino and Papageno. A number of stage directors address this absence by putting Papageno and his bride onstage for the final scene, even though the libretto does not mention them and Mozart gives them no music to sing.

Yet another complete change of characters follows, but no change of scene (despite, as mentioned earlier, what one sees in a number of modern productions): as the happy Papageno and Papagena exit, Monostatos and the Queen of the Night, with her Three Ladies, enter the same garden, planning to attack Sarastro’s brotherhood (section 13). And finally, as the plotters are overthrown and sink into the earth, a last set change “transforms the entire theater into a sun” and reveals Sarastro and the Chorus, who hail the gods Isis and Osiris and the triumph of courage and wisdom (sections 13–15).

Interestingly, the original libretto suggests that Schikaneder and Mozart wanted to minimize the sense of episodic separation at this moment, and visibly juxtapose the downfall of the Queen with the triumph of Enlightenment. The libretto’s stage directions clearly indicate that the transformation scene, which must have been spectacular, occurs before the final lines for Monostatos and the Queen, “Zerschmettert, zernichtet ist unsere Macht, / Wir alle gestürzet in ewige Nacht” (Our power is broken and destroyed, / We are plunged into eternal night). These lines would thus have been sung as a despairing, defeated response to the blazing light of the sun; and Sarastro, Tamino, and Pamina would have witnessed the disappearance of the plotters.¹⁹

Perhaps the most striking feature contributing to the episodic nature of The Magic Flute finales is the sharp changes in musical style that heighten the sense of separation from one section to the next. Examples of such stark changes are many, and we may point to just a few as examples. In the Act 1 finale, the conclusion of Tamino’s scene with the Priest leads to his playing his flute and hearing Papageno’s pipes in reply. In the final brief Presto of the scene (mm. 212–25) he sings excitedly of the possibility of finding Pamina, yet his vocal line is elegant and noble, shaped around expressive high notes. Moments later, with Pamina and Papageno’s “Schnelle Füße, rascher Mut,” the music changes to a playful, patter-driven style with a completely different character.

In the Act 2 finale, we have already seen several dramatic changes in style and mood, such as the C-minor music of the two Armored Men (beginning in m. 190) that follows Pamina’s happy, lyrical quartet with the Three Boys. Another is the entrance – also in C minor – of the Queen of the Night and her plotters, hard on the heels of the silly and delightful music of Papageno and Papagena’s reunion (mm. 745ff.).

But even within what is ostensibly a single musical section, Mozart often creates a sharply varied series of musical styles. The opening ninety-three measures of the Act 2 finale vividly illustrate the composer’s flexibility, and the sense of separate episodes that results.

As already noted, the finale opens in feierlich style, with the Three Boys foretelling an end to superstition and the return of a glorious day of wisdom; they sing homophonically to a noble andante march (mm. 1–28). Yet as soon as they see Pamina, the style changes to a livelier feeling, animated by an “oom-pah” string accompaniment (beginning in m. 30). This agitato accompaniment and the rapid dialogue among the Boys might almost make the passage sound comical, were it not for the turn to C minor and the chromatic stepwise lines of measures 36–37 and 43. As the Boys’ confrontation with Pamina continues, Mozart freely shifts among styles: the pulsating accompaniment and chattering dialogue; several moments of elevated tragedy for Pamina, culminating in the moment of her suicide attempt at measures 84–91; and serene, feierlich beauty, as when the Boys call out to Pamina at measures 63–66. The effect within this one short scene is almost kaleidoscopic, as Mozart emphasizes an instant responsiveness to every momentary phase of the drama over stylistic consistency and continuity. And it is surely this degree of stylistic variety within a section, as well as the even starker stylistic changes between sections described above, that accounts for the perception of Mozart’s Magic Flute finales as episodic.

In the end, of course, it is no surprise that Mozart’s finales for The Magic Flute reflect the influences both of the opera buffa, of which he was such a master, and of the fairy-tale German operas his friend and collaborator Schikaneder was producing with great success at the Theater auf der Wieden. At the level of overall structure, the model of the opera buffa finale prevailed – as, indeed, it did in the finales of the other Viennese German operas of the decade, from Dittersdorf’s Der Doktor to Wranitzky’s Oberon and the collaborative Der Stein der Weisen. There is no reason to doubt, in fact, that the chain-finale model was simply borrowed from opera buffa by composers of German opera, a familiar set of procedures easily adaptable to their own, somewhat different, needs. As to character and style, on the other hand, we can recognize in The Magic Flute finales the same episodic feeling and the same mixture of widely differing elements that pervade the opera as a whole: the feierlich and the farcical, the grandeur of Sarastro’s prayer to Isis and Osiris and the captivating silliness of the bird-couple’s stuttering happiness in “Pa-Pa-Pa.”

By comparison with the finales of The Magic Flute, those of Der Stein der Weisen and the other German operas performed in Vienna during Mozart’s last few years seem a bit ordinary. Or, to put it the other way around, in comparison to the finales of these works, those of The Magic Flute sparkle with life. Yet, this difference lies not in a different approach or a different set of procedures but in the fact that Mozart’s ability to animate each character and characterize each moment is unmatched. When Pamina laments, for instance – whether at length in her devastating Act 2 aria, “Ach ich fühl’s,” or more briefly in her contemplation of suicide in the finale to Act 2 – her sadness is gripping to a degree that the grief of the lovers Nadir and Nadine in Der Stein der Weisen cannot reach. Similarly, the humorous scenes for Lubano (the Papageno character) in the same opera are charming, but they are never as funny or as touching as those for Papageno himself. As in so many other musical genres, Mozart outdistanced his contemporaries not by the uniqueness of his approach but by the brilliance of his dramatic instincts and musical invention.