Fans of detective stories will remember that in both Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express and A. Conan Doyle’s “The Five Orange Pips” the difficulty confronting Poirot and Holmes is not one of too few suspects or too few clues, but too many. The Magic Flute has for much of its history posed a similar problem to those who have investigated the possible sources of its plot, characters, and meaning.

Several contributing factors spring immediately to mind. Information about the origins and gestation of the project remains unusually murky. Further, unlike the court-sanctioned operas that preceded it in Mozart’s career, The Magic Flute made its initial home in a theatrical environment to which historians of opera have devoted relatively little attention. The collaboration with Schikaneder was also an unusual one for Mozart in that he was working with not just a librettist but also the commissioner of the work, the director of the theater where it was to be performed, and a principal in its first cast. But most of all, the text that Mozart’s music brought to life grew out of no single, identifiable source.

Although our training has historically equipped musicologists to deal with musical sources rather than literary texts and their sources, we of course know that operas begin not as musical scores but as literary narratives, and that where those narratives come from and how they are shaped and reshaped for the musical stage is as much a part of an opera’s pedigree as its musical genesis. This should be especially apparent for a work like The Magic Flute, destined as it was for a particular kind of musical stage, one on which words are not poesia fatta per musica but a combination of the spoken and sung delivered by actor-singers trained and practiced in, theatrically speaking, a bilingual tradition.

From the very beginning, efforts to identify the sources of The Magic Flute found themselves entangled in problems of interpretation, more often than not instigated by the well-nigh irresistible urge to uncover some hidden meaning beneath its motley, child-friendly surface. Ideally, historians of any art form should try to distinguish work-to-interpretation issues from source-to-work problems. In reality, however, they are always intermingling. For Mozart’s earlier operas (Così fan tutte appears to be a notable exception) the presence of a single, clearly identifiable model helps regulate inquiry into both how a work came to be and what it has come to mean. The absence of a single-source model for The Magic Flute, however, opened to a tribe of hunter-gatherers a potentially limitless store of possible antecedents. Interest at first centered on fairy tales and other magic operas, but later, as the opera grew in stature, the stockpile expanded to include plays by Shakespeare and Calderón, the Bildungsroman, and legends from Classical antiquity.

How, then, does one go about assessing the wide array of candidates that over time have been scattered across the literature on The Magic Flute as models, or influences, or in some degree consanguine ancestors? It may prove useful to take as a point of departure the work of two writers, in fact both Germanists rather than musicologists by training, who have attempted a more or less systematic inventory while keeping at bay the legacy of legends and misinformation concerning the opera’s genesis and authorship. Peter Branscombe’s inaugural chapter in his Cambridge Opera Handbook, “The Sources,” singles out seven literary antecedents drawn from a variety of genres: epic, novel, play, essay, and opera (both heroic and comic).¹ These he orders not by weight but by date, from the twelfth-century French romance Yvain, to Kasper der Fagottist, an exact Viennese contemporary of Mozart’s opera. Egon Komorzynski chose a different path in his biography of Schikaneder, whom he spent half a century defending from calumny and disparagement.² He orders his sources following what he imagines to have been the creative stages that led to the finished opera.

Choosing his words carefully, Branscombe strives for an evenhanded, impartial evaluation. The relevance of the Arthurian Yvain, previously absent from the literature on The Magic Flute, he limits to the opera’s opening scene, for whose origins “no satisfactory explanation has so far been offered.”³ He lavishes greatest attention on the French novel Sethos (1731), identifying both parallels and outright borrowings. Branscombe notes some “resemblances” in Tobias von Gebler’s tragedy Thamos, König in Ägypten (1773, itself much indebted to Sethos), but after only a single paragraph on the play he turns his attention to Mozart’s incidental music as the more significant link. Next, he notes a few “verbal echoes” in Schikaneder’s text from Ignaz von Born’s essay on the mysteries of the Egyptians (1784), but he reserves discussion of Freemasonry as an influence for a separate chapter on the opera’s “intellectual background.” In 1856 Otto Jahn had declared that Schikaneder’s play began life as in essence a dramatization of “Lulu, oder Die Zauberflöte,” a Märchen from Wieland’s three-volume collection Dschinnistan (1787–89). Although Jahn’s assertion maintained uncritical currency for the next century, Branscombe finds the story’s importance exaggerated and, moreover, has little to say about the significance of the other tales in the collection, which many have found an important fund of motifs and features. He puts more stock in Carl Ludwig Giesecke’s (unacknowledged) adaptation of Sophie Seyler’s Hüon und Amande for Paul Wranitzky as Oberon, given its premiere under Schikaneder’s direction in 1789. Branscombe not only hears “literary echoes” of this work in The Magic Flute but also finds common dramatic situations. (Edward Dent, too, had singled it out as an “obvious” model.⁴) Another contemporary Viennese magic opera, however, Perinet’s farrago Kaspar der Fagottist, produced by Schikaneder’s rival Marinelli while he and Mozart labored on their own opera, and which gave rise to the notorious “plot reversal” thesis, Branscombe dismisses curtly as “probably not a material influence.”

Earlier, Komorzynski had also canvassed many of these antecedents, but his analysis bristles with the biases and distortions that Branscombe had been at pains to avoid. First, the fifty years separating the two editions of his biography of Schikaneder had only deepened Komorzynski’s atrabilious exasperation and disgust with Otto Jahn’s many “falsehoods” disparaging Schikaneder and promoting Giesecke as the true author of The Magic Flute. Second, he rejected out of hand Jahn’s warm advocacy of “Lulu” as model and instead declared, with even greater enthusiasm and considerably less evidence, that Gebler’s Thamos was the opera’s “main foundation.” Komorzynski seems to have been seduced by the loftier dramatic pedigree of Gebler’s heroic plot, coupled with a more general urge to restore Schikaneder’s literary credentials, which Jahn and Dent had denied him and invested instead in “Professor” Giesecke. But in pairing up successive scenes in The Magic Flute with this “main foundation,” Komorzynski can adduce little beyond the priestly scenes in Act 2 and the similarity of the names Thamos and Tamino to support his leading candidate.

Both Branscombe and Komorzynski confine their source surveys to literary works and treat separately other social and cultural influences on the opera. The most familiar and most discussed of these is of course Freemasonry. Outside Vienna a few forays proposing or suggesting Masonic associations had already appeared in the 1790s, but it was again Jahn who gave Freemasonry property rights to a decisive share in the opera’s character and meaning. Serious study of Freemasonry as a hidden allegory, however, began only with Paul Nettl in 1932, ratified in Jacques Chailley’s elaborate scene-by-scene exegesis in 1968.⁵

The Masonic allegory enjoyed steady, if not exclusive, hermeneutic favor until 2004, when David Buch mounted a spirited attack on Masonic and other esoteric and cryptic readings of the opera, which in his view had eclipsed or obscured its indebtedness to popular traditions.⁶ Having studied in detail European fairy-tale literature, Schikaneder’s earlier stage works, and the repertoires of Vienna’s suburban theaters, Buch concludes that a great many of the purportedly Masonic elements in The Magic Flute, as well as other striking features of the libretto, could as readily have been found by Schikaneder in these contemporaneous sources (plot reversal, rejection of Monostatos, the trial scene, misogyny, the Three Genii, and thwarted suicides). Buch’s larger aim, however, was not simply to debunk the excesses of Masonic readings but to sketch, in both its literary and musical dimensions, the lineaments of a new Viennese genre, the eighteenth-century “fairy-tale opera.”

Earlier, Stefan Kunze had rejected this designation: “[The opera’s] world of images is related to the fairy tale,” he wrote in 1982, “but the work itself is no ‘fairy-tale opera.’”⁷ Kunze called it instead “a drama of education” (“ein Erziehungsdrama”). Instruction as a tenet of theatrical representation is of course as old as theater itself, but the trials and spiritual growth Tamino and Pamina undergo had no precedent in Mozart’s earlier operas – nor in Schikaneder’s, for that matter. Their trials also bear only fleeting resemblance to those found in eighteenth-century literary antecedents like Rousseau’s Émile or Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.

What kind of an opera did Schikaneder and Mozart themselves think they were writing? Mozart’s personal catalogue called The Magic Flute simply “a German opera” (“eine teutsche Oper”), and Schikaneder’s published libretto carried the designation “eine große Oper” (a grand opera) – a term neither man had used before and which most probably was prompted by the production’s lavish visual effects and considerable musical ambitions. Something on this order was apparently what struck Salieri and the singer Cavalieri when they attended a performance as Mozart’s guests: “You cannot believe,” Mozart wrote to Constanze, “how agreeable they both were, – how greatly not only my music but the libretto and everything taken together pleased them. They both said it was an opera worthy to be performed at the grandest festivity before the grandest monarch.”⁸

Beyond being told to expect something grand, those at the premiere who carried a copy of Schikaneder’s published text into the theater would have found little additional help in its cast list. From top to bottom, the characters are listed by name and nothing else – no descriptor to suggest role type, occupation, or relationship to each other. Kunze’s strained attempt to subsume the seven principals under the traditional eighteenth-century system of role types only serves to highlight how little The Magic Flute relies on familiar theatrical conventions. One could argue, and with more than a little justification, that many of the most memorable characters in Mozart’s earlier Viennese operas also defy categorization as mere role types (Osmin, the Countess, Don Giovanni, and Fiordiligi come immediately to mind). But even here the associations and parallels occasionally proposed by commentators between the cast of The Magic Flute and figures from other Mozart operas (Monostatos – Osmin, Sarastro – Don Alfonso, Pamina – Ilia) fail to capture any real continuity with the past.

Still and all, if the characters do not conform to traditional role types, their actions may yet conform to a familiar plot type. But here, too, the opera frustrates expectations. Of Northrop Frye’s four narrative categories (Comedy, Romance, Tragedy, and Satire), Romance is the only one that comes close to the opera’s unusual plotline.⁹ According to Frye, a Romance narrative, typically chivalric, is most fully realized in “the successful quest,” which has three stages: perilous journey (agon), crucial struggle (pathos), and exaltation of the hero (anagnorisis). A good deal of torsion is needed to twist the plot of The Magic Flute and its protagonist into conformity with this scheme. Its crypto-Egyptian setting, unlike the one traversed by Giesecke’s knight-errant in Oberon, is anything but medieval, and a protagonist whose first line is “Help!” and whose first onstage act is to faint is anything but chivalric. Similarly, Frye’s description of the hero of a Romance as “a central character who never develops” works for Hüon in Oberon but not for Tamino. Though, in the literal sense, the opera’s protagonist¹⁰ Tamino as hero emerges only slowly. In fact, once the Queen has sent him on his quest to rescue her daughter, we lose track of his adventures for a while and involve ourselves instead with the perils besetting Pamina and Papageno. Tamino’s “crucial struggle” in his confrontation with the Priest in the Act 1 finale pits him against not the dark antagonist Frye prescribes but his benighted self, and the exaltation he receives at the end of the opera is not for him alone as its hero but for the couple (“euch Geweihten”) of which he forms a part.

Taken together, the poor fit in The Magic Flute of traditional plot types and role types, as well as its marked deviations from Mozart’s earlier operas and from the fare in its own day at Vienna’s suburban theaters, together with the slow but spectacular growth in enthusiasm for the new work, all reinforce the perception of the opera as something new and unexpected. To see Mozart’s last opera as not a culminating but an exploratory work should also put to rest much of the accumulated nonsense about the opera’s conception and creation: that Schikaneder tapped Mozart for a popular work to save him from bankruptcy, for instance, or that its plot was changed in desperation over its similarity to a rival work, or that it was a defensive action to “save the Craft.”¹¹

Mozarteans have in fact shown little inclination to celebrate The Magic Flute as the culminating masterpiece of his operatic career, but prefer to see it instead as the dawn of what would have been a new chapter in that career. Some Austro-German writers go even further in proclaiming it the gateway work that inaugurated and inspired nineteenth-century German Romantic opera. Kunze, who declares it “a manifesto of a new, higher, and elevated humanity,” draws comparisons throughout his chapter on the opera not with other Viennese magic operas, about which he seems to have known little, but with the music of Beethoven and Wagner.¹²

While the atypicality of The Magic Flute opened a wide field for its exegetes, what seems puzzling is the need felt by many of them to stake a claim to sole proprietorship of the work’s meaning and to put down other claimants. It may be worth considering whether their different readings are necessarily at odds with each other. For example, to acknowledge the currency of some of the opera’s features in popular sources does not invalidate their Masonic associations, and initiation into esoteric rituals ought to enrich rather than obscure connections to the idea of a drama of education.

In his book The Genesis of Secrecy Frank Kermode explored the implications for literary divination of works that invite both popular and esoteric interpretations.¹³ He pointed in particular to a passage in the Gospel of Mark where Jesus tells his disciples why he preaches in parables. Somewhat surprisingly, Jesus tells them that he does so not to reveal spiritual truths but instead to hide them from “those on the outside … so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may hear but not understand.” Only to his disciples, to the initiates, are such mysteries to be disclosed.

Kermode labeled the different interpretations made available to outsiders and insiders as, respectively, “carnal” and “spiritual.” As one of the high priests of academia, he naturally favored the latter and saw a direct parallel to them in the dissection, divination, and deconstruction of narrative texts that goes on in university seminar rooms. An even greater authority had much earlier voiced a similar distinction between popular and esoteric readings and applied it specifically to Schikaneder’s libretto. Toward the end of his long life, Goethe, talking to Eckermann about his forthcoming Faust II, speculated that the “unwashed” will no doubt be content to take pleasure in what they see, whereas “the higher meaning will not escape the initiate, as is the case with The Magic Flute and other things.”¹⁴

Practically from its inception, the special nature of The Magic Flute has inspired a steady stream of deep dives into a seemingly bottomless pool of hidden meanings. In addition to the perennial Masonic explorations, an assortment of allegorical, metaphorical, symbolic, mystical, numerological, and archetypal constructions continue to bear out Jocelyn Godwin’s twin observations that all great symbolic works of art engender a variety of interpretations and that, in the case of The Magic Flute in particular, its exegetes “all find the libretto sensible, consistent, and full of meaning.”¹⁵ Franz Grasberger goes even further: for him the opera is every inch a Symbolstück whose plot simply cannot be taken at face value.¹⁶

For those who view The Magic Flute as a kind of parable enshrouded in esoteric lore, it follows almost of necessity that insiders’ interpretations based on such lore will be deeper, higher, and more spiritual than ones discerned by “those on the outside.” Gernot Gruber has suggested a different analytic division, one that avoids the bias that the insider-outsider model enjoins.¹⁷ Interpretations in one group, which he labels causal-historical, ground themselves in the opera’s cultural-political world; those in a second, metahistorical group dispense with this limitation in favor of the abstract, the mythic, or the universally human.

The first thing we might notice is that hidden meanings can fall into the first as readily as the second of Gruber’s categories. In the opera’s early years, for example, writers in the Francophile Rhineland took the Queen of the Night as a cipher for the Ancien Régime, while those in conservative Austria saw her realm as a coded depiction of the Revolution’s Jacobin rabble. The second thing to notice is that for much of the opera’s reception history these and similar causal-historical readings predominated. In 1923 Emil Blümml inventoried a spate of such “Ausdeutungen,” many of them political allegories and all of them fitting comfortably in Gruber’s causal-historical track.¹⁸ Metahistorical in(ter)ventions, on the other hand, have grown ascendant in our postmodern age. This shift brought with it a turn from interpretations that favor allegory to explorations that rely on the symbol and the archetype.

Archetypes differ from causal-historical categories like role types and plot types precisely in their metahistorical character. One sees this immediately in the case of Papageno. Jahn’s biography had labeled him causal-historically as a “Hanswurst,” a clown figure indispensable to Viennese popular theater, an ascription repeated in 1920 by Hermann Abert in his revision of Jahn’s work. Some recent writers see Papageno instead as an instance of the “wild man” archetype, familiar in German folklore but, as Ehrhard Bahr has noticed, almost entirely absent from eighteenth-century German literature.¹⁹ Godwin has applied the concept of the archetype developed by Carl Jung with enthusiasm to the other principal roles in The Magic Flute (Tamino–anima, Pamina–animus, Monostatos–shadow, Sarastro–sage, Queen of the Night–devouring mother). He concedes that, unlike allegorical interpretations, Jungian archetypes “cannot have been in the creators’ minds,” but they nonetheless find their justification in Jung’s collective unconscious. Further, he implies that the opera’s second act inevitably demands of its interpreters some such hermeneutic tool. “The historical-allegorical interpretations may explain the characters and the basic plot, but if that were all, the opera might as well end as soon as Tamino’s loyalties are transferred to Sarastro at the end of Act 1.”²⁰

Archetypes, while they may liberate the interpreter from the constraints of history (and of whatever may have been in the authorial mind), remain types, and pretty rigid ones at that. Other interpreters have preferred to approach the opera armed with the more flexible arsenal furnished by the symbol. Here, The Magic Flute offers no end of low-hanging fruit. In harvesting this bounty, one master trope has outdone all others – the conflict between day and night, light and darkness, and between their personification in Sarastro and the Queen of the Night. The danger in deployments of this trope has lain in construing its oppositions in extreme or even absolute terms. Grasberger, for example, describes Sarastro as “the completely spiritualized man, in his way as unreal as the Queen of the Night is uncanny.”²¹ For Chailley, theirs is an irreconcilable conflict between two worlds, masculine and feminine. Alfons Rosenberg does Chailley one better: for him, they are locked in the mother of all wars, “the primeval battle between the powers of light and darkness,” which he traces back to Babylonian and biblical creation myths.²²

Night and day, light and darkness, are what cultural anthropologists like to call complementary opposites: together, they comprise a whole, but not a higher-order one. That achievement is left to the new initiates, Pamina and Tamino. As the embodiment of “Schönheit und Weisheit” (in the words of the final chorus), they hold out at the opera’s end a utopian promise. The opera, however, leaves identifying what this might be to its exegetes.

In the theater, of course, utopianism is bad for business, and both Goethe’s attempted sequel and Schikaneder’s own “Part Two,” Das Labyrinth, paint a dark future for the young couple, in which the Queen and her minions return to resume the “primeval battle.” Several recent writers have turned instead to the original engagement and to calling into question its tropological self-evidence. This has required some creative engineering. Jessica Waldoff, for example, amalgamates the opera’s master trope with the quest archetype. Sarastro and the Queen necessarily recede into the background as the opera’s “dominant metaphor” transmutes from a standoff to a journey, from the intractable opposition of Night and Day to “the move from darkness to light.”²³ That this is Tamino’s journey she emphasizes with a liberty she takes in translating his cry at the very heart of the drama:

Word order suggests that the second verse of this couplet should read in English: “When will the light find my eye?” Waldoff, however, does greater justice to Tamino’s quest by translating it poetically as “When will my eyes find the light?” She also stresses that, although the “high-minded theme” of The Magic Flute is a quest for knowledge (rather than for a damsel in distress), historically and ideologically the opera is a post-Enlightenment work in which the enlightenment Tamino seeks is to be spelled with a lower-case “e.” By this orthographic change, Waldoff effectively relocates the concept of enlightenment from its eighteenth-century cultural-historical acceptation to Gruber’s metahistorical category and its orientation toward the universally human.

Another strand of recent scholarship dealing with the opera and its symbols revisits Sarastro, and especially the Queen, in order to wrest them from their traditional roles as simple hypostatizations of the two poles of its master trope and to explore each of them instead as complex and, indeed, contradictory individuals.

Petra Fischer, in her essay “The Rehabilitation of Sensual Nature,” warns that the night–day dichotomy is insufficient as an interpretation of either the opera itself or the Queen and Sarastro.²⁴ As a topos, darkness-and-light is not as simple as black-and-white. Like Kunze, she rejects the Märchenoper designation, under which the opera’s master trope reduces to the unnuanced good–evil antinomy of fairy tales. The stories in Dschinnistan, to look no further, ask us to accept without explanation the assignment of good and evil to their characters. In The Magic Flute, however, the Queen is not immediately and existentially evil. She has a back story. Her earlier marriage suggests that the opera’s two opposing spheres were once united but have since degenerated and reached a point of imbalance that she and Sarastro are incapable of righting. The eponymous magic flute itself becomes of interest in Fischer’s interpretation: unlike Oberon’s horn and similar magic instruments in other operas, it has an origin separate from its donor, in the prelapsarian world of Pamina’s father. Pamina, in fact, is for Fischer the key to the “rehabilitation” in the title of her essay, for it is she who tells Tamino the story of the flute’s origin, and who must undergo her own trials (more severe than Tamino’s, because more real) before the world she remembers can emerge once more. The joint initiation of Tamino and Pamina, then, suggests not so much a restoration of an old order, which few in 1791 would have thought feasible, as something akin to Miranda’s “brave new world.”

If commentators have often idealized Pamina as a child of nature, they have just as often cast her mother as the embodiment of Unnatur, as a being so consumed by her power struggle with Sarastro that she is willing to suborn even that most natural of bonds, between mother and child, to bring about his destruction. In her revisionist portrait of the Queen, Kristi Brown-Montesano has argued against taking Sarastro and the Queen as simple avatars of the opera’s master trope, for where there is no real parity of power there can be no real dualism. Despite the advance publicity of Papageno and the Three Ladies, the Queen gives only the appearance of a powerful absolute potentate. Beneath this exterior roils an inner mother-ruler conflict.²⁵ Mozart’s memorable music for her, in consequence, amounts to little more than a sham display of power, masking her inability to take matters into her own hands. Brown-Montesano pleads for the restoration in Act 2 of the full spoken dialogue between mother and daughter preceding “Der Hölle Rache,” routinely cut or even eliminated from performances and recordings and the only instance where the Queen admits her powerlessness: “Dear child,” she tells Pamina, “your mother can no longer protect you. All my power was buried with your father.”

Alfred Einstein once wrote: “Never did Mozart write ‘for eternity,’ and it is precisely for that reason that much of what he wrote is for eternity.”²⁶ As a proposition this makes little sense, a point we can demonstrate easily enough by simply substituting another composer of the day for Mozart. (“Never did Dittersdorf write ‘for eternity,’ and it is precisely for that reason that much of what he wrote is for eternity.”) In terms of our present discussion, though, what Einstein seems to have done is to draw a metahistorical conclusion from a causal-historical premise. This conflating of Gruber’s two categories invites us to consider whether they may, like the many interpretations they subsume, complement rather than compete with each other. The trick is to expand and integrate rather than reduce and eliminate. That may not be an especially welcome prospect for those who must decide how to stage the opera. Like Poirot and Holmes, they will face not too few options but too many. Happily, those who write about this provocative work need contend with no similar perplexity. For, as a member in particularly good standing of Godwin’s “great symbolic works of art,” The Magic Flute will no doubt continue to attract mutually enriching, multidimensional readings of its plot, characters, and meaning.