In August 1794, the Journal des Luxus und der Moden, a beautifully illustrated fashion magazine, alerted its readership to a cultural phenomenon: Die Zauberflöte.¹ Mozart’s opera had swept through German-speaking Europe on an irresistible tide of enthusiasm, its progress coming to a temporary halt only at the linguistic border.² Already there were many different stage versions, but this represented only part of the opera’s triumph. As one sold-out production followed another, Die Zauberflöte began to permeate the fabric of daily life, generating an extensive material legacy of its own. Merchandise on offer ranged from cheap trinkets, mementos of productions, to expensive gifts, based not just on the appeal of the music but on the colorful characters and the eye-catching visual imagery. Yet even as the world flocked to see this beguiling fairy tale and purchase its brand, it faced a revolutionary war that would demolish nations, destroy alliances, and displace millions. The opera was not immune to the effects of this chaos, and darker threads run through the tapestry of its early reception.³

The year during which Die Zauberflöte established its position as an icon of Viennese culture was a turbulent one for the Austrian monarchy. The early death of Leopold II in March 1792, just two years into his reign, left his inexperienced son Franz facing a war with France. Vienna celebrated his accession with a public illumination, accompanied by firework displays, wind-band music, and Turkish ensembles. On the name day of the new emperor, an installation in the Augarten featured an artificial mountain with miners at work, accompanied by “beautiful” music.⁴ The commemoration of the revered empress Maria Theresia, still a significant event a decade after her death, began with a banquet in the Schönbrunn Orangerie. The imperial party then visited a Venetian fair to drink coffee in a boutique, where incidental music was provided by a clock that played an opera air from a well-known work every minute.⁵ Later, there was a ballet in a magnificently lit Chinese garden house, and the day’s entertainment came to an end with a Papageno-like figure, a Jewish lad clad as a bird-catcher, who performed more than fifty birdcalls before revealing that his cage was in fact empty.⁶ A light approach to entertainment, favoring mixed-genre variety programmes, was now in vogue; it was an environment tailor-made for Die Zauberflöte.

It is not known when Franz and Marie Therese first saw the opera in the theater, but they soon got to know its music. A score featured in the décor of their Haus der Laune (house of caprice), a folly constructed in 1798 in the English landscape park at Laxenburg: “On the frescoed walls are real title pages and pieces of music by famous composers … entire volumes attached to the wall can be leafed through.”⁷ Imperial soirées began to feature its music in an undemanding genre: the quodlibet. Marie Therese commissioned several medleys featuring opera arias. John Rice makes the intriguing suggestion that Ignaz von Seyfried’s offering, based on a repertoire list supplied by the empress herself, was intended to represent her husband. If so, “Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön” salutes him as a high-minded hero who receives a gentle reminder of his wife’s physical attractions!

In view of the enthusiasm for Mozart’s Italian comedies along the cultural axis linking Bohemia with Saxony, it is not surprising that Prague, Dresden, and Leipzig were quick to stage Die Zauberflöte. As soon became the pattern everywhere, success on the stage inspired a range of merchandise. In Prague, sets of invitation cards were produced, featuring scenes from the opera; two pairs survive from 1793 and 1794.⁸ When Joseph Seconda’s production opened in Leipzig in January 1793, twelve colored engravings were put on sale, depicting characters in costume.⁹ Each figure is accompanied by a phrase of text, in most cases the first line of its character’s aria.¹⁰ Aspects of the iconography of these illustrations may well derive from the Leipzig production. Another set of pictures was published in Trier in 1797, also displaying vivid imagery. The Queen is shown wearing an ordinary black ball gown, brilliantly emblazoned with stars; one of her three assistants appears to offer Tamino a recorder; and fearsome men in black stand before portcullises that bar the way to the testing ground. The captions feature snippets of text, by no means restricted to aria first lines; Monostatos, seen from behind as he gazes upon the sleeping Pamina, exclaims: “Weiss ist schön.” This set also has a narrative element, focusing on happy endings: Tamino and Pamina (“Tamino mein”); and Papageno and Papagena (“Nun bin ich dir ganz gegeben”).¹¹

As a keen card player himself, Mozart would doubtless have been chuffed to learn that a memento on offer in Leipzig was a board game, a variant of the ancient gioco dell’oca (game of the goose) in which players move their counters inwards round a spiral track to square sixty-three in the center, hoping to avoid penalties and benefit from concessions.¹² The small cartoons scattered along the route exhibit figures and scenery. If square twenty-three represents Pamina’s place of captivity, she awaits her prince in a medieval turret. The traditional “death” square (fifty-eight) hosts the two men in black armor. Papageno appears twice with a dulcimer, striking it with tremendous vigor. A rite of passage, this operatic version of the game ends with a series of extra squares: three depict the trial of fire, one the magic flute, and four the trial of water. Although the rules of play are not known, landing on the square of the magic flute must in some way have facilitated admission to the Grecian “Tempel der Weisheit.”

A popular party game, described in several social entertainment manuals of the late 1790s, was simply entitled Papageno.¹³ Rife with sexual innuendo, the improvised drama required a bird-catcher, selected from the company, to trap a bird and by extension a partner for life, sight unseen. The rules of the game leave the manner of performance entirely open; as described, it could sit anywhere on a spectrum from innocent diversion to drunken sex caper. Blindfolded, Papageno is led back into the room, where a circle is formed to whirl round him while two strophes are sung to the tune of “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen.” He sounds his pipes to stop the dance, makes a “V” sign with his forefinger and middle finger, points in a random direction, and then begins to “lure” an unknown person. The victim approaches and inserts a finger into his “Klobe” (the fowler’s cleft-stick trap represented by the “V”), which promptly snaps shut. Papageno must now divine the gender of the captive, which he does with obvious parody: “Ein Männchen! Ein Männchen! Oder Ein Weibchen! Ein Weibchen!”¹⁴ If he gets it wrong, he is ribbed, especially if he has let an attractive partner escape. The next stage parodies the bird-catcher’s checklist of Pamina’s personal characteristics, as further details of the unknown person are elicited: either in one-word responses to a question (“schön oder häβlich?”), or through the use of innuendo (“auf eine verblümte Art”). Papageno now has to name the “little bird” he has captured, and if he is successful, the two will switch places in a manner to be determined by the full company.¹⁵ The game is a re-enactment of the moment when Papageno, faced with the reality of life with an ugly crone, allows himself briefly to dream of a more beautiful alternative. Another Zauberflöte game, rules unknown but probably involving pairing as even numbers are required, was advertised as a suitable gift for Christmas or New Year in 1793.¹⁶

A version of Papageno for children, with sexual innuendo removed, featured birds, as the participants each select a songster such as a “Nachtigall,” a “Lerche,” or a “Stiglitz” (goldfinch).¹⁷ A bird able to perform a tune from the opera appears in a tiny playlet, also for children. Jensen boasts to Lennchen that the bullfinch (“Gimpel”) with which he hopes to make a fortune can whistle four tunes, including a little piece from Die Zauberflöte. Easily trapped – hence its name “sucker” – but valuable (once trained to perform a song), the bullfinch is mentioned by Papageno during his long conversation with Tamino after “Der Vogelfänger”; if the prince asks such stupid questions, he will be “trapped like a bullfinch in my aviary” (“wie einen Gimpel in mein Vogelhaus”).¹⁸

The opulent Königsberg production (1794) exemplified the opera’s debt to the world of fashion and its influence on it. An early review began with an account of the costumes, treating the singers as models on a catwalk: Sarastro with a silver undergarment and a wrap of glazed gold, attendants clad in “Mousselin” (satin); the Queen of the Night with an embroidered red gown; Tamino, in Japanese costume, with a hose of glazed gold and a bodice embroidered “à quatre couleurs,” set off by a wrap of green atlas weave; Pamina with a garment of white atlas weave and a ponceau (poppy-colored) wrap.¹⁹ Papageno’s outfit caused a great sensation as his feathers gave the illusion of flight in response to the slightest movement. There was no need for Monostatos to black up as he wore a black leather mask, very natural looking! But substandard costumes would usually attract criticism. A review of the 1793 Passau production took Pamina to task for looking like a seventeenth-century German woman “quite in the manner of a marionette.”²⁰ The Zauberflöte “look” proved very marketable. As the Journal des Luxus report noted, little Papageno flutes (“Papageno-Pfeiffchen”) were all the rage among the lads. Fashionable accessories, these items could have been sold as badges to be sewn on clothing, as pin-on brooches, or as sounding whistles to be slung round the neck. Papageno masks were available for balls.²¹ For women who wanted to self-identify with a character, there were hair styles, headbands, muffs, and workbags à la Papagena, presumably not contributing to the representation of an aging hag!²²

The visual magnificence of the sets was a big factor in attracting audiences. A celebrated series of engravings by Joseph Schaffer, dating from around 1794 and published in the Allgemeines europäisches Journal in 1795, may represent the sets used in the Brünn production: one shows a snake, tastefully trisected; another features Sarastro’s entry on a throne drawn by lions, his attendants clad in Turkish garb (see Figures 4.3–4.8 earlier in this volume). The scene in which Tamino and Pamina submit themselves for testing is presented with due solemnity. A challenge both to painters and machine designers, this set piece was often seen as a test of the effectiveness of the opera’s scenography overall. A generally weak production in Cassel was redeemed by the speedy transformation achieved in the test of fire, a feat credited to “Mechanikus Moretti.”²³ When Schikaneder transferred his production to the new Theater an der Wien, all went well: the audience witnessed a “sea of fire and a column of flames, steam and smoke which rises in billowing waves against the clouds, and is instantly transformed into a raging, plunging stream to great effect.”²⁴ In Der gestiefelte Kater (Puss in Boots), Ludwig Tieck satirized inadequate staging when at the end of the play recourse has to be had to Mozart’s music for the trials by fire and water in order to produce a memorable climax.²⁵

Die Zauberflöte was created in a world fascinated by high-quality human automata. Shortly before Mozart’s death, Carl Enslen advertised a theatrical performance embodying a union of music, painting, and sculpture with technology.²⁶ His show offered the intriguing spectacle of robots able to communicate expressively.²⁷ Musical automata also featured prominently in displays of waxwork figures. Joseph Müller was quick to incorporate in his celebrated show a “künstliche Stahl Harmonika,” which played the most enjoyable melodies from the opera.²⁸ The Salzburg entrepreneur Bartholomäus Lemminger went further in a display in the Lichtensteg in Vienna that featured a wax model of “Der Vogelfänger Papageno.”²⁹ Some early productions of Die Zauberflöte were influenced by the automata on display in these very popular shows. In Königsberg, an inventor came up with a two-octave “Glockeninstrument,” the sound of which was supposed to resemble that of a harmonica.³⁰

Part of Papageno’s charm is that he sings in an unaffected mechanical style, a robotic topic taken by Richard Middleton to represent rational classicism reduced to its “nuts and bolts.”³¹ His musical box numbers presented retailers everywhere with an opportunity to rake in the cash. Small aural mementos were manufactured on an industrial scale: clocks, miniature barrel organs, whistles, figurines, and musical toys incorporating clockwork. Their timbre varied but not their reliance on machine-generated sound. The glockenspiel’s distinctive tones came to define the opera.³² At the other end of the technological spectrum, the great mechanized orchestra developed by Johann Georg Strasser for St. Petersburg began, symbolically, with the arresting chords of the overture.³³

By early 1794, the darkening political landscape across Europe was starting to have a discernible effect on the reception of Die Zauberflöte. This was evident both in the emergence of allegorical interpretations with a political slant and in the detail of some staged versions. In the wake of the occupation of the Rhinelands by French armies, an unambiguously pro-Jacobin reading of the work gained currency. It cast the Queen of the Night as an embodiment of the Ancien Régime and Pamina as freedom itself, “a daughter of despotism.”³⁴ Acknowledging that the French Revolution formed no part of the original conception, it argued that, in the spirit of the times, the work could now be viewed as “Propagande der Freiheit.”

A rival reading of Die Zauberflöte was offered in Weimar.³⁵ It sees the work as a universal allegory of man’s progress from darkness into light and hints that “certain orders” might recognize this journey in their own ceremonies. Whether or not Schikaneder and Mozart took Masonic ritual as a model for some scenes in Act II, the craft was quick to claim the ethos of Sarastro’s realm, adapting the music to its own fraternal context. In Freymaurer Lieder mit Melodien, Papageno’s “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen,” shorn of its sprightly dotted rhythms and marked moderately slow, is set to Ludwig Hölty’s famous hymn to loyalty: “Uebt immer Treu und Redlichkeit” (Always practice truth and honesty). It includes a choral da capo for the assembled brethren, as does the arrangement of “Seid uns zum zweiten Mal willkommen.”³⁶ In this and other published collections a mood of benevolence prevails, but sharper political point-scoring sometimes intrudes. An advertisement for the second edition of a Masonic collection of choruses and songs by “O. Br. W. E. Mozart” alerted purchasers to a comment denigrating the emperor himself. A “freedom-mad Franz” is scathingly identified as Monostatos, the opera’s imprisoner-in-chief.³⁷ In a nifty bit of textual editing, the two stanzas of Sarastro’s Act 2 aria are blended to telling effect: “In ächten Maurer Hallen steht Tugend felsenfest” (In true Masonic halls virtue stands rock-solid).

In the pervasive atmosphere of crisis gripping revolutionary Europe, all sides saw Die Zauberflöte as an irresistible resource for the expression of their views. Doubtless thanks to its association with “Ueb immer Treu,” “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen” established itself at the heart of the Prussian military establishment when the carillon of the Garnisonkirche in Potsdam was reprogrammed in 1797 to facilitate hourly renditions of it.³⁸ At the opposite end of the political spectrum, Papageno’s tunes were quick to infiltrate the fast-proliferating republican song repertoire. Liederlese für Republikaner, a collection of song texts, includes a setting of Sarastro’s aria.³⁹ But the favored tune from the opera (allocated to three songs) is “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen”; Papageno’s signature piece thus rubs shoulders with overtly political melodies such as “God save great George our King” and the Marseillaise.⁴⁰ Even more striking is the use of “Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja!” as the tune for “Das Lied des freien Mannes,” the unofficial Rhinelands ode to equality.⁴¹ In sentiment close to Robert Burns’s contemporaneous “A Man’s a Man for a’ That,” the song proclaims that everyone in the new order, pimp or count, slave or king, will be able to sing: “Ich bin und bleib ein freier Mann!”⁴² The author Friedrich Lehne, who signs himself simply as “Lehne: Republikaner von Mainz,” credits “Mozzart” with the tune and identifies the opera. On the other hand, the version published in Humaniora in 1798 makes no mention of the composer or the opera; as with a true folksong, the tune title alone is sufficient for identification.⁴³ “Das Lied des freien Mannes” to Papageno’s tune is followed in this source by two ardent republican songs: a celebration of Joseph Warren’s heroism at the Battle of Bunker Hill, his sword colored with “Brittenblud”; and an ode entitled “Dem Helden Napoleon Buonaparte,” which begins with the optimistic accolade “Friedegeber!”⁴⁴

By the mid-1790s, republican themes were starting to infiltrate new translations of the opera. A telling example comes in the three-act version prepared by Christian August Vulpius for Mannheim and Weimar.⁴⁵ In Mannheim, the first performance had been scheduled for January 6, 1794, but events upstream, the loss of Alsace to the French in the Second Battle of Wissembourg on December 26, 1793, led to a state of emergency and the temporary closure of the theaters. Once things had calmed down, Die Zauberflöte in the “more palatable” translation by Vulpius was given on March 29.⁴⁶ By then, the Weimar premiere had taken place.⁴⁷ Vulpius reworded the first line of the Queen of the Night’s rage aria as a direct plea for assassination: “Es sterbe der Tirann von deinen Händen.”⁴⁸ The echo of a well-known revolutionary slogan celebrating the regicide of Louis XVI could hardly have been missed. The demise of “Ludwig Capet” (the commoner’s name assigned to the king) was reported in typically understated fashion on January 29, 1793, by the republican journal Argos, edited by Eulogius Schneider in Strasbourg, but there was nothing understated about the accompanying ode which begins in triumph: “Es sterbe der Tyrann, der Volksverrätther!”⁴⁹

The short-lived journal Rheinische Musen, our main source for the opera’s progress in this highly politicized region, sometimes looked further afield, while maintaining its distinctive focus on the political backstory. It credited Il flauto magico, the Italian translation presented by Domenico Guardasoni in Prague, Dresden, and Leipzig in 1794, to Scipione Piattoli, a priest closely associated with a large expatriate community of Poles. In the aftermath of the Polish-Russian War of 1792, thousands had taken refuge in Saxony under the leadership of Tadeusz Kościuszko and Ignacy Potocki. The former had passed through Lemberg, now Lviv in the western Ukraine, where he is likely to have encountered the Polish translation of Wolfganga Amade Mozarta’s new opera. The premiere of Die Zauberflöte in Lemberg on September 21, 1792, is the first known performance of the work outside Vienna, a clear reflection of the speed with which it spread through the Austrian monarchy.

By the time Il flauto magico opened in Leipzig, its author Piattoli was already under arrest, his French sympathies attracting scrutiny.⁵⁰ The radical, Masonic views espoused by the leaders of this expatriate community left their mark on the Italian translation. Its “argomento” identifies the work’s main allegory as a platitude: “misfortunes” (unidentified) may in the end still turn out well. In the circumstances, Poles exiled in Saxony might well have read that as a coded political comment.⁵¹ The most significant change in Act 1 is the incorporation of an aria for Pamina (“Infelice, sconsolata”), an impassioned if thoroughly conventional lament that resonates with the reading of her as a political prisoner.⁵²

In a sharply divided Europe, even attendance at this most escapist of operas could become a pointed signal of political allegiance. In the summer of 1796, the situation in the Rhinelands was deteriorating fast, as a French army under the command of General Jean Victor Marie Moreau began to push into south Germany along the Neckar. A traveler from Regensburg was surprised when the bombardment of Cannstadt was paused so that Die Zauberflöte could go ahead in nearby Stuttgart. But the audience was unusually limited. The unknown observer noted with evident satisfaction that local “women of class” were boycotting the performance, prompting French members of the audience to make fun of the timidity of the fair sex in the city.⁵³

During his long association with the opera, Goethe acted as a powerful advocate of its universality. In Hermann und Dorothea (1797), an idyll set in an era of revolutionary war, a young man is sent with supplies for refugees in the Mainz area. He meets and falls for a young woman who is assisting the destitute and has just helped at a roadside birth. His father, though, wishes him to marry well. As instructed, he sets his cap at the daughter of a well-to-do neighbor. He listens to her singing at the piano but is puzzled by references to “Tamino” and “Pamina.”⁵⁴ Having thus exposed his total ignorance of the opera, he is ridiculed. Later, he learns that the household has awarded him the ironic nickname “[Mr.] Tamino.” In 1797, a real-life Hermann might well have assumed that the young lady was calling her lapdogs, given the current vogue for naming pets after characters from the opera!⁵⁵ In this story, Zauberflöte pointedly represents affluent domesticity with its comfortable musical soirées, a world untouched by the unfolding human catastrophe.

Yet Goethe believed that the soundscape of Die Zauberflöte was just as appropriate for victims of poverty and war on their stages: the open road and the temporary camp. Accordingly, when he began work on his unfinished sequel, he modified the portrayal of Papageno, refashioning him as an altogether less cozy symbol of humanity’s place in the world than the original child of nature. Jane K. Brown sees the characterization of the bird-catcher and his wife as the “glummest” feature of this fragment: “They come onstage carrying rabbits by their ears and birds by their wings.” As if the commodification of the fuzzy friends of Die Zauberflöte was not bad enough, Papageno and Papagena are still childless.⁵⁶ The absence of any of the “Kinderlein” so joyfully anticipated in the original amounted to a striking rebuttal of the warmth of its tone.

The Journal des Luxus had already been struck by the way that the opera’s melodies were permeating the lowest strata of German musical society. It was not surprising that its sonic reach should have colonized middle-class safe spaces: “Bädern, Gärten, Caffeehäusern, Gasthöfen, Redouten und Ständchen.” More striking was its presence on the streets, represented by a procession of itinerant entertainers and vagrant fiddlers: “Unsern Stadpfeifern, Prager-Musikanten, Bänkelsängern, und Marmotten-Buben.” Two of these generic vagabonds – the ballad singer and the marmot knave, an itinerant beggar boy who performs tricks with his animal to the sound of a hurdy-gurdy – had appeared earlier in Goethe’s farce Das Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilern (1773).⁵⁷ There is nothing cute about this picture of a furry animal jumping through a hoop; its antics have (so far) staved off its owner’s starvation (“und immer was zu essen fand”). Prague musicians are wandering players, fiddlers like those in Wilhelm Müller’s “Der Prager Musikant,” who travel with instrument on the back.

Other outdoor beneficiaries of the opera were presenters of “Laterne-Magique” shows. Goethe was much moved by engravings of street entertainers, self-employed in their chosen genre; such images, he thought, expressed the humanity of the poor. A well-known example is the woman player of the “L’orgue de Barbarie,” a striking visual counterpart to Papageno with his basket.⁵⁸ The bird-catcher is relatively unencumbered by his lofty wicker cage, but she, with a living to make and no tenure in the realm of the Queen of the Night, has serious weight to carry: a substantial barrel organ slung in front of her and on her back a peep show. In effect she transports her own stage.⁵⁹

In October 1813, the apocalyptic Battle of the Nations signaled the approaching end of the carnage of the Napoleonic era, and the music of Die Zauberflöte was on hand to celebrate its passing. A remarkable satire, Politisches Quodlibet, oder Musikalisches Probechart, was published in Hannover on November 21, a month after this epic defeat for the French.⁶⁰ Cast in the form of a typical Viennese quodlibet, it consists of texts from five Mozart operas and works by Salieri, Martín y Soler, Dittersdorf, Wranitzky, and others.⁶¹ Also stitched together in this patchwork quilt are many folksongs, national songs, and political pieces.⁶² Die Zauberflöte is a primary source, and Napoleon quits the European theater of war using its language, interspersed with several utterances from his favorite composer Paisiello. Extremely bitter, he exclaims “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen.” An accompanying cartoon depicts a fire-breathing dragon. He defiantly taunts the Allies: “Tod und Verzweiflung sey eu’r Lohn.” To their suggestion, derived from the words of Monostatos, that he should shut his eyes if he does not like what he sees, he replies with some Grétry: “Non, non, non, non, non, non, j’ai trop de fierté.” His response to Jérôme Buonaparte’s pathetic plea for help (“Zur Hilfe! Zur Hilfe!” – Tamino’s words at the start of the opera) draws on the same character’s refusal to assist in the quintet (“Ich kann nichts thun”).⁶³ This piece also supplies the moment of farewell, as Napoleon’s ship sets sail back across the Rhine:

Beyond the majestic open spaces of the adjoining Residenz Platz and Mozart Platz in Salzburg, an innocuous alleyway leads – surprisingly for the uninitiated – to another tiny square, Papageno Platz, graced by twentieth-century Austrian artist Hilde Heger’s modest statue of the dedicatee. It is a salutary reminder that The Magic Flute makes its lighthearted and serious musical, philosophical, literary, and physical presence felt in all kinds of (often unusual) places. Up to the early twentieth century, its arias and ensembles provided material for variation sets by the likes of Anton Eberl, Joseph Gelinek, Fernando Sor, Ludwig van Beethoven (WoO 46 and Op. 66), Étienne Jean François Gebauer, Bartolomeo Campagnoli, and Charles Grobe, as well as potpourri, medleys of tunes, and transcriptions by Johann Christian Stumpf, Louis Boiledieu, Louis Spohr, Jacques-Louis Battmann, Carl Czerny, Charles Samuel Bovy-Lysberg, Joachim Raff, Sigismond Thalberg, and Ferrucio Busoni. The opera also occupied the minds of many great artists of the twentieth century, including Max Slevogt, Oskar Kokoschka, Marc Chagall, and David Hockney, who produced costumes and stage sets for productions, Magic Flute-themed paintings, murals, and – in Chagall’s case – a segment of the repainted ceiling of the Paris Opéra (Palais Garnier).¹

A single chapter can account for only a small portion of the impact of a work as culturally rich and influential as The Magic Flute. I shall look initially at critical writings on the opera, focusing on the different periods in which it first came to prominence in Germanic, French, and anglophone countries, as well as at contributions made by Mozart’s major nineteenth-century biographers. I then turn to a representative sample of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary works and visual media that reference or are inspired by The Magic Flute.

The Early Biographical and Critical Reception of The Magic Flute

The Magic Flute enjoyed remarkable success in Germanic countries in the 1790s, probably contributing more than any other individual work to Mozart’s meteoric reputational rise in the decade or so after his death. Performances were numerous, and work and performers critically lauded; many published arrangements, as well as unpublished ones for dances, for serenading lovers, for fairs, and so on, also enabled musicians to get to know and appreciate the opera in whole or in part outside the theater.² Early biographer Franz Niemetschek (1798) asked rhetorically whether anyone in Germany was as yet unfamiliar with it and called it “our national work” (unser Nationalstück).³ (In a later edition from 1808, he explained that The Magic Flute “announced [Mozart’s] greatness abroad,” stimulating interest in other Mozart works.⁴) Even as early as 1793 a reviewer of a piano reduction considered discussion of the opera’s quality superfluous.⁵ The aesthetician Johann Heinrich Gottlob Heusinger (1797) held up The Magic Flute – always admired by the Germans, he wrote – as a gold standard for musical “unity” (Einheit), remarking that a feeling of calm striving toward an elevated goal pervaded individual numbers and the opera in its entirety.⁶ Anticipating the diverse interpretations of later years, one critic considered The Magic Flute to have been conceived (to his mind unfortunately) as an allegory of the French Revolution, with the Queen of the Night representing the Ancien Régime, Pamina freedom (though still the daughter of a despot), Tamino the people, Sarastro the wisdom of a better law, and the Priests the national assembly. Mozart as creator of the excellent, beautiful music was not to blame, we are told, and was probably unaware of the allegorical content in any case.⁷

German writings by Johann Friedrich Rochlitz (1798) and Ignaz Arnold (1803) are respectively the most influential and important from the first dozen years of The Magic Flute’s life. Criticism of librettist Emanuel Schikaneder’s work had surfaced before Rochlitz’s famous anecdotes about Mozart’s life and works: in addition to negativity about the purported allegory reported above, Niemetschek explained that Mozart greatly improved and enhanced texts in the act of setting them to music, including the “wretched” (elend) one for The Magic Flute.⁸ Rochlitz intensified hostility toward Schikaneder by impugning his moral conduct: Schikaneder is accused of exploiting Mozart’s goodwill to dig himself out of a serious financial hole and then of reneging on a commitment allowing Mozart (who was said to have composed the opera for free) exclusive rights to resell the score after the first production.⁹ As with Rochlitz’s dramatized story of the commissioning and composition of the Requiem and subsequent review of the first edition, initially ignoring then attempting to marginalize and trivialize Franz Xaver Süßmayr’s involvement, he views Schikaneder in effect as an unwelcome distraction: Süßmayr and Schikaneder meddle at their peril with remarkable achievements that are Mozart’s and Mozart’s alone.¹⁰ Arnold is slightly critical of Schikaneder, such as when imputing his probable desire to have a big bravura aria where Pamina contemplates suicide in Act 2 rather than the musically sensitive and subtle response provided by Mozart.¹¹ But it is only Mozart’s participation that really interests him. The Magic Flute, recipient of Arnold’s longest chapter on an individual opera, is identified as Mozart’s greatest work, with inner beauty, perfection, pure feeling, and quiet and inner joy communicated in individual numbers and at the level of the whole opera. Inspired musical depiction of individual characters is witnessed throughout: the noble simplicity and gentleness of Sarastro’s “In diesen heil’gen Hallen”; Pamina’s continual projection of inner feelings, eschewing passionate outbursts; Tamino’s utmost delicacy and certainty of feeling in “Dies Bildnis,” properly developed and never overwrought, a model of emotional expression to all young composers; and the boiling, raging, and frothing of the Queen of the Night in “Der Hölle Rache.”¹² Arnold’s enthusiastic homage to The Magic Flute marks a fitting conclusion to early Germanic veneration. And in keeping with the larger narrative of his book, Arnold contributes thoughts on the opera’s aesthetic import, in particular Mozart’s use of orchestral instruments as expressive support for the text.

Admiration for The Magic Flute came later in France than in Germany, but when viewed in context was just as noteworthy. At the Paris Opéra in 1801, Mozart’s work was transformed at the hands of E. Morel de Chédeville and Ludwig Wenzel Lachnith into Les Mystères d’Isis, with excerpts from Figaro, Don Giovanni and La clemenza di Tito placed alongside substantial reworking of the dramatic structure and much of the music of The Magic Flute. While this was a controversial adaptation from the start, critics agreed about the redeeming quality of Mozart’s music. One writer identified the music as the truly new and enchanting feature of Les Mystères (accepting that dancing and scenery also contributed to the production’s success), Mozart taking us back to nature with his melodic purity and simplicity and superbly communicating somber and melancholy emotions in the Priests’ marches and ceremonies.¹³ Another was enraptured by Mozart’s music alone, enthusing that originality, truth, freshness, and grace, in harmony and melody, rendered it irresistible.¹⁴ The adaptation could be faulted, but Mozart’s contributions could not.¹⁵ And the popularity of Les Mystères, in the short and long terms, went hand in hand with growing French interest in Mozart’s biography.¹⁶ Rochlitz’s anecdotes were translated into French in 1801, and reviewed and partially reproduced in various publications; Théodore-Frédéric Winckler’s Notice biographique sur Mozart, also from 1801 and widely distributed, began by observing that Mozart had been a subject of public attention since the premiere of Les Mystères.¹⁷

England, in the grip of a different Magic Flute at the turn of the nineteenth century (a version of Christoph Martin Wieland’s Oberon where a flute replaced the original magical horn),¹⁸ did not encounter Mozart’s opera on stage until 1811, translated into Italian. But various numbers were already familiar to the public through published arrangements before the British premiere.¹⁹ And more would follow in the years immediately after the premiere, including for piano and flute; for piano alone; for harp; for piano, flute, and cello; and for two pianos.²⁰

Early nineteenth-century anglophone criticism engaged with a number of themes and predilections crystallizing around the opera. The overture was repeatedly singled out for special praise: “an effort of human genius, which … will command the admiration of ages to come”; a “masterpiece of composition [that] still electrifies all classes of auditors”; a “universal favorite, and most spirited composition”; “an inimitable masterpiece, which will forever be the model of overtures, and the despair of composers.”²¹ Combined veneration of music and deriding of text and plot characterized writings in both the United States and Britain. “It is very curious,” mused one American critic citing The Magic Flute as a prime example, “how often beautiful music has been composed by men of the most eminent musical genius to poems void of all probability in their events, of all correctness or distinctness in their delineation of character, and of all elevation in their language.” In Britain, another described The Magic Flute more bluntly as “the most divine music … allied to the most stupidly absurd story, if indeed it be a story at all, and not a monstrous vision of a sick dream.” For George Hogarth, “in our apprehension, it must ever be a matter of regret that [Mozart’s] most enchanting strains should not have been called forth by a subject more fitted to rouse the feelings and sympathies of our nature.”²² A critic in 1832, citing Schikaneder as “a bye-name of ridicule,” considered the text so bad that the (incomplete) sequel from Goethe surely came about only under duress: “One might fancy, had Goethe been a Catholic, that this composition had been a penance imposed on him by his confessor.”²³

Narratives around The Magic Flute also connected a peak of creative achievement with a fatal physical decline in the final months of life. (The idea that Mozart experienced physical decline for a protracted period in 1791 is now widely understood as an exaggeration.) In The Percy Anecdotes: “It was composed by him in his last illness, and he was frequently excited and exhausted during the composition of it, even to fainting. He loved it beyond all his other pieces; and when it was brought out at Vienna, he attended the ten first representations, until his health became so feeble that he could not go to the theatre.”²⁴ While he wrote, his “wife and friends would try to win him out from his infatuated abstraction in which he was fast tending to realize his own presentiment, by getting him out to walk … But in vain … It seemed a miracle how he completed it. He said that the whole second act was conceived in one day in a stage-coach, and that he only wanted more hands to write it down fast enough.”²⁵ Mozart, we are told, worked on the score “so freely given to one in distress … for sixteen and eighteen hours a-day; and if we consider the exhausting nature of his employment, and the corroding anxieties of a pecuniary nature which still beset him, we can not wonder that he was becoming prematurely old, and prey to the most painful nervous disorders.”²⁶ Plainly, the legend of the Requiem, including feverish and obsessive composition in the immediate run-up to Mozart’s death, influenced descriptions of The Magic Flute, a work completed just a month or two earlier.²⁷

The major nineteenth-century biographers of Mozart – in German, French, and English – promoted these (and related) critical themes. Georg von Nissen (1828) considered the music of The Magic Flute so superior to the text as to render the latter almost insignificant, regarded the overture as a magical piece of the highest mastery, and deemed Schikaneder a bungler who made unreasonable demands on Mozart.²⁸ Alexandre Oulibicheff (1843) tried to reconcile high admiration for the music with a low opinion of the libretto and plot, which seemed the product of a sick mind, featuring trivial dialogue, dreadful verses, and absurd buffoonery. The shortcomings of the text, he thought, were partially mitigated: by the tradition in which Schikaneder worked (including a need to engage the “rabble” [populace]); by the advantageous inclusion of Masonic symbolism, with battles between wisdom and madness, virtue and reason, light and darkness; and by the inspiration Mozart clearly derived from it at various points. According to Oulibicheff, bringing together the biographical position and musical quality of The Magic Flute, it was not unusual for a severely ill young artist like Mozart to attain the greatest strength in spiritual and poetic respects as a direct consequence of physical exhaustion.²⁹ Edward Holmes (1845) joined anglophone colleagues in regarding Schikaneder’s contributions as universally poor and Mozart’s as consistently brilliant, as well as in linking work on the opera to Mozart’s ultimate demise: “It was during the composition of the ‘Zauberflöte’ that the eruption of those symptoms which portend decay of the vital powers, and a general breaking up of the constitution, first appeared. As usual, he grew interested in his work, and wrote by day and night … . He sunk over his composition into frequent swoons, in which he remained for several minutes before consciousness returned.”³⁰

Elsewhere, Otto Jahn (1856) offers glimpses of positivity on Schikaneder’s work, including issuing credit to him for creating Papageno. But he toes the standard line about Schikaneder’s general disreputability and shoddy libretto, regarding The Magic Flute in fundamental respects as Mozart’s achievement alone. The classic trope of Mozart’s serenity when (supposedly) sensing imminent death is also aired: “there is revealed a perfected spirit at peace with itself, which having fought and overcome all opposition from within, has no longer to dread that which comes from without.”³¹ For Ludwig Nohl (1863), who continued to promote literary and moral distrust of Schikaneder, Mozart’s spiritual journey to a higher plane – in advance of and while recognizing impending death – coincided with work on The Magic Flute: beyond the “joys of life,” having “closed his account with life’s gifts,” Mozart turned to the highest matters on earth in The Magic Flute, before heavenly ones occupied his attention in the Requiem.³² Ultimately, a decisive change in Schikaneder’s critical fortunes would have to wait until the publication of Hermann Abert’s biography (1919–21), which impressively refuted notions of incompetence – moral and literary – and malign influence on Mozart,³³ and thereby provided a foundation upon which sensitive and incisive libretto- and text-led research could build. While Schikaneder’s contribution to The Magic Flute is usually valued highly now and deemed worthy of Mozart’s musical setting, lingering doubts about it continued to be expressed into the late twentieth century.³⁴

Responses to The Magic Flute in Literature and Other Fiction

The sequels, parodies, and adaptations of The Magic Flute in the decades after the premiere are further evidence of the opera’s remarkable early popularity.³⁵ In addition to Les Mystères d’Isis (discussed above), the most famous is Goethe’s Magic Flute Part Two, unfinished and abandoned by 1800; it is darker than the original, perhaps in response to the deeply disconcerting social implications of events in France.³⁶ Comprising an incomplete libretto, which includes instructions for musical setting and staging, Goethe invoked popular elements of the original: the stagecraft (most importantly, the trials of fire and water); the contrast between the respectively earthy and lofty pairings of Papageno–Papagena and Tamino–Pamina; and the magic of the magic flute, which is now played by Papageno and alleviates Tamino’s and Pamina’s distress, only for despair to return immediately (and comically) when the flute is not played during Papageno’s breaks. Goethe takes the ideological struggle between the Queen of the Night and Sarastro/Tamino to the next generation in the battle over Tamino and Pamina’s son, whom Monostatos and the Queen have imprisoned underground in a casket protected by fire and water. In similar fashion to the original Magic Flute, Tamino and Pamina have to work hard to achieve their goal (the son’s release), while Papageno and Papagena – disgruntled at their childlessness – see their own problems solved in a flash by Sarastro planting eggs in their dwelling and having children emerge from them.

A cross section of nineteenth-century fiction captures the diversity of literary work inspired by The Magic Flute and by those associated with it. Schikaneder makes a number of appearances, including in an imaginary dialogue “Mozart und Schikaneder: Ein theatralisches Gespräch über die Aufführung der Zauberflöte im Stadt-Theater” (1801), in which he and the spirit Mozart muse on the popularity of The Magic Flute, their coauthorship, and the work’s continued success in Vienna and further afield.³⁷ In line with prevailing critical negativity, he is a villainous character in other sources. “The Story of ‘the Requiem’” (ca. 1850) describes him as “one of the greatest rascals in the ranks of German managers … always in debt,” a rogue who carried out “tricks which might have sent him to a gaol and a guillotine.” One such trick, a wager with Anton Stadler (the virtuoso recipient of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto) that he could “half kill Mozart with fright” in order to “convince all Vienna of his foolish belief in supernatural agency,” involved instructing Hofer (cousin of Mozart’s brother-in-law, musician Franz de Paula Hofer) to commission the Requiem in a mysterious way. Deeply affected by the strange circumstances, Mozart died shortly after completing the work and before being able to write three operas requested of him: “Schickaneder [sic] knew that he was liable to heavy punishment for what he had done … and the triumph of possessing Mozart’s last opera was too profitable a pleasure to be given up to another. Unless Mozart wrote another opera, nothing could eclipse the Zauberflöte; and he might hold all audiences captive with Mozart’s last work, if Mozart died. If he lived, the scene would be changed. I [Hofer] believe that a diabolical prudence made Schickaneder poison him.”³⁸ In his biographical romance about Mozart, Heribert Rau (1858) is scarcely more generous toward Schikaneder, portraying him as an unprincipled, conniving, luxury-living theater director who bleeds Mozart dry. Schikaneder abuses his position by setting himself up to take advantage of a poor young girl, a profoundly unsettling turn of events for the principled, generous, and sensitive Mozart, who is inspired to write the song “Das Veilchen” after meeting her. Then, Schikaneder spreads all kinds of exaggerated gossip about the staging of The Magic Flute in order to heighten anticipation of the premiere, ensure a large and eager audience, and maximize ticket receipts, safe in the knowledge that Mozart’s music would win everyone over at the eventual staging of the opera, with exaggerations consequently being forgotten.³⁹

In a story of Beethoven’s youth (1842), Mozart passes the compositional baton on to Beethoven when working on The Magic Flute; Beethoven’s only encounter with him happens in Vienna at that time. (In reality, Mozart and Beethoven may have met when Beethoven visited Vienna in spring 1787, but not in 1791.) In the same account, Schikaneder, ridiculed for his appearance and pompous manner, is also presented as a malign influence on Mozart; following a strain of nineteenth-century criticism, he – like Süßmayr in the case of the Requiem – is a mediocrity meddling with a genius.⁴⁰ Away from Schikaneder, Heinrich Smidt (1841) wrote a morality tale for children, The Magic Flute, inspired by the characters and events of the opera. A boy called Love Truth, thrown in jail for speaking the truth and now free, is sent with a flute to seek his way in the world by his mother, the Goddess of Truth. Encountering a wise and kind King and entering his service, Love Truth makes people speak honestly by playing his flute, which is helpful to the King. But when the Princess (the King’s beloved daughter) reveals herself to be in love with him, Love Truth is tempted to lie about having noble parentage – the condition for marriage – in order to win her. But before so doing, he has a dream that frighteningly reveals to him the consequences of such immoral conduct. When recalled to the court and offered the Princess’s hand, he refuses it on the grounds that he was born a peasant. The King is delighted: it had been a test for Love Truth, who has passed! Love Truth is knighted and marries the Princess.⁴¹

Two works from the interwar years that could not be more different in subject matter, orientation, and seriousness capture in microcosm the diversity of inspirations drawn from The Magic Flute in the twentieth century. Lotte Reiniger’s “Papageno” (Germany, 1935) is a charming, ten-minute animated film about the eponymous character’s exploits, accompanied by music from the opera. Birds are Papageno’s life – friends who bring him food and drink, play his magic bells, rescue him from a serpent, and save him from suicide (after an ostrich had taken Papagena away during the serpent attack). In the animated silhouette genre, Reiniger is able to play visually and psychologically with fluid human and avian forms: during “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen,” birds turn into women then back into birds and fly off; three birds stand in for the Three Boys and prevent Papageno from hanging himself; and as Papageno and Papagena in “Pa, pa, pa” imagine having lots of children, birds break eggs on cue and children jump out (possibly in reference to Goethe’s sequel to The Magic Flute). In contrast to Reiniger’s lighthearted film, a novel by G. Lowes Dickinson (1920) uses The Magic Flute as inspiration for its allegory of one of the twentieth century’s greatest challenges: rebuilding after the horrors of World War I. Tamino assumes the position of the world’s conscience: after providing the stimulus for war, in calling for Monostatos and his army following an unproductive first encounter with Pamina, Tamino participates willingly in it, comes to hate it, tries passionately to persuade everyone to abandon it, and then (in effect) reconstructs society through a spiritual journey and pursuit of truth in re-examining fundamental principles of religion, sophistry, and skepticism. The flute itself, protecting Tamino during the fire and water trials, conveying positive messages, and providing a moment of spiritual bliss at Tamino’s final encounter with Pamina, symbolizes social enlightenment in the rebuilding process.⁴²

The Magic Flute inspired a number of twentieth-century cinematic endeavors in addition to Reiniger’s animation, most often alongside narratives about the end of Mozart’s life. Whom the Gods Love (1935, director Basil Dean), tracing Mozart’s successes and failures, represents The Magic Flute as the apogee of his popularity, understood by the public at last. As Constanze explains to a threatening aristocratic patron toward the end of the opera’s performance, “No one can hurt him now; he has done what he was born to do [achieving great esteem through The Magic Flute] … We [Mozart and Constanze] can never be like other people, we have so little time. … I’ve known it for some months, and he knows it too. We have to live a lifetime in a few years.” A German film by the same title, Wen die Götter Lieben (1942, director Karl Hartl) interweaves accounts of The Magic Flute and the Requiem. Schikaneder, frustrated at Mozart’s slow progress on the opera, tries to interest Mozart in the aria “Ein Mädchen.” But after playing the opening bar or two, Mozart puts it away dejectedly and turns to the Recordare from the Requiem instead. On his deathbed, immediately before the final rehearsal of the Requiem, Mozart proudly imagines numbers from the opera being performed at that moment; with family and rehearsal participants later standing solemnly to acknowledge his passing, Schikaneder races in ebulliently, recounting tales of the extraordinary success of the opera performance that evening, unaware that Mozart is now dead. Hartl revisited the composer’s final months in The Life and Loves of Mozart (1955), but now with The Magic Flute and its circle of characters as the primary subject matter, rather than the Requiem. It imagines a love affair between Mozart and inspirational muse Anna Gottlieb (the original Pamina) during the composition of The Magic Flute; only when she is with him can he finish the opera.

In Amadeus (1984, director Miloš Forman), The Magic Flute and Requiem are again brought together in memorable musical and dramatic fashion, as representatives of the light and dark in Mozart’s world, the former ultimately and inevitably ceding precedence to the latter.⁴³ As a prime example of a work where “the crowd of spectators take pleasure in what is obvious, [and] the initiated will detect the higher meaning” in Goethe’s famous formulation, The Magic Flute will no doubt continue to provide material for fictional, critical, musical, artistic, and dramatic inspiration and interpretation for generations to come.⁴⁴

The compositional history of The Magic Flute remains shrouded in mystery, especially when compared with Mozart’s other famous stage works for which we are fortunate to have sources, sometimes in abundance. The genesis of this opera has attracted interest since the early nineteenth century, but its study has been hindered by the absence of many of the kinds of evidence that inform our understanding of the creation and revision of Mozart’s other operas: letters, sketches, evidence of revision, and alternate arias or ensembles composed later. As a result, until recently, much that has been claimed, especially about the libretto, has been based on speculation, misreadings of the sources, or outright fraud.

To take just one common assumption about the work as an example: it is paradoxical that precisely because we lack the evidence normally associated with late eighteenth-century operas – Mozart’s other operas are obvious examples of the tendency for contemporary stage works to change in the course of their first productions, in restagings, and in moves from one city to another – Mozart and Schikaneder’s magic opera has appeared to be the most fixed of all of Mozart’s mature stage pieces. (La clemenza di Tito is a possible exception.) This is unlikely, doubly so for a work for a suburban theater with strong ties to the Hanswurst tradition of low musical comedy, and for one centered on a leading comic actor who was also the author of its libretto and director of the company that created it. The work does draw on musical conventions of more elevated opera, but even the pieces heard at the Burgtheater were subject to constant revision. The Magic Flute must have been entirely at home in the Theater auf der Wieden, and it is difficult to imagine that a work conceived for that house was more fixed in its text and music than those staged at the court theater.

To appreciate and understand the real compositional history of The Magic Flute we need to identify and set aside many dubious stories told in the past and many still-influential assumptions. We also need to consider expanding our definition of a source and to recognize that the opera’s apparent stability is an artifact of its transmission and an accident of its chronology. There is a lot to undo in examining the various artifacts, assumptions, and myths that make up the compositional history of The Magic Flute, but also some genuine starting points for understanding the work’s creation.

What We Do and Do Not Know

The paucity of sources for The Magic Flute has created problems for those wishing to study its genesis and premiere, in contrast to the rich variety of sources that document Mozart’s other operas and their revision under the composer’s supervision. The evidence begins with his own letters. Mozart’s long-distance collaboration on Idomeneo with his librettist Giambattista Varesco was chronicled in letters through his father, which supply some of Mozart’s most famous comments on opera composition. So do the letters written when he and his librettist Johann Gottlieb Stephanie created Die Entführung aus dem Serail; these are even more telling because of the extensive rethinking of their plans along the way. By contrast, Mozart wrote little about the genesis of The Magic Flute. Several letters mention the routine work of an assistant (Franz Xaver Süßmayr) in copying materials, and a couple bask in the work’s warm reception once it found its way onto the stage. Other than that, we do not hear much from Mozart: he composed one (unidentified) aria out of boredom; he quoted a line of text (“Tod und Verzweiflung war sein Lohn”) to his wife; and on two occasions he met or dined with Schikaneder.

The lack of information in letters is largely a feature of circumstance. Mozart was beyond busy during the composition of The Magic Flute, with the sudden commission of La clemenza di Tito, an opportunity he surely could not pass up, coinciding with his collaboration with Schikaneder. He presumably had little time to write at length about his work – and his principal correspondent on topics like this, his father, was no longer alive. Communication between librettist and composer must have been close and direct. (This is also true, of course, of his work with Lorenzo Da Ponte.)

Mozart needed no introduction to the Theater auf der Wieden, nor any intermediary with Schikaneder, and this probably contributed to a gap in the record of The Magic Flute’s creation. Indeed, Mozart’s role in the composition of Der Stein der Weisen (The Philosopher’s Stone) suggests that he may have been a regular in the social and professional company of the Theater auf der Wieden’s musical staff. His sister-in-law Josepha Hofer (the first Queen of the Night) was a member of Schikaneder’s troupe, and Mozart probably also had connections through Anna Gottlieb (his first Barbarina and Pamina) and her parents, who worked for the court theater.

There is also almost nothing on the work’s origins from Schikaneder’s side, just a comment in the preface to his opera Der Spiegel von Arkadien (The Mirror of Arcadia, 1794). Objecting to changes that had been made to The Magic Flute in a recent production, he asked in the preface how somebody could “have thought of mutilating an opera which I thought through diligently with the late Mozart.”¹ This tells us little beyond confirming Schikaneder’s authorship and collaboration with the composer.

Unlike Mozart’s many stage works for which there was an operatic or literary model, The Magic Flute was not based on a play or an existing libretto. It does draw on tales from Christoph Martin Wieland’s collection Dschinnistan, but those stories are third-person narratives, not spoken dramas with interpolated poetry. And although they contribute the work’s fairy-tale type,² its exotic locale, some character names, and a few plot devices, the stories do not represent the kind of direct literary starting point we have for other Mozart operas. Some colorful Egyptian detail evidently came from Jean Terrasson’s novel Sethos and Ignaz von Born’s On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, but The Magic Flute as a drama is almost wholly newly invented.

Musical materials in Mozart’s hand illuminate the genesis of many of his operas. For Die Entführung we have sketches, the draft of a discarded ensemble, and late compositional cuts in several numbers. Autograph materials for Le nozze di Figaro likewise reveal some aspects of its compositional process; for example, some draft material survives, including the planned rondò, “Non tardar, amato bene,” ultimately abandoned in favor of a different aria. The autograph score of Così fan tutte documents the replacement of a second-act aria for Francesco Benucci during the course of production. For The Magic Flute, there is nothing comparable. A few sketches survive, but the autograph score is remarkably clean. Overall, the autograph materials reveal relatively little about the work’s creation and much less than for other operas.

For most of Mozart’s operas we also know about revisions made to original productions as they were coming together and to later stagings: the last-minute deletion of arias in Idomeneo, and revisions to that work made for Mozart’s later performances of music from it in Vienna; traces of deleted music in Figaro, substantial cuts made in the course of its Vienna run, and revisions for a new production in Prague in which Mozart and Da Ponte may have had a hand; and new arias and a duet for Don Giovanni’s move from Prague to Vienna, along with the elimination of the scena ultima.

But Mozart’s death soon after The Magic Flute’s initial production meant, of course, that no revival with the participation of the composer ever took place. This leaves us without evidence of the sort of revisions that were regularly undertaken in his stage works when they were remounted. In addition, there are no surviving musical sources that can be confidently associated with the first production, depriving us of evidence of its realization in any form that was directly connected with Mozart.

Overall, then, we have much less evidence on the genesis of The Magic Flute than we do for many of Mozart’s other operas. But that does not mean that the work did not have a compositional history, or did not undergo revisions in the course of its composition, staging, and performance. The lack of evidence is potentially misleading; we need to be careful not to assume that the work, in the form we have it, was created as a perfect, unified, and organic whole by its composer and librettist.

False Histories and Theories

The picture that emerges of The Magic Flute’s creation is thus much vaguer than for his other mature operas. At the same time, or maybe for that reason, commentary and scholarship on the genesis of The Magic Flute have been plagued by false histories that have obscured the picture even further. Foremost among them is the claim that Karl Ludwig Giesecke was jointly or even completely responsible for the opera’s libretto. The assertion, reported second- or thirdhand well after the fact and with potentially suspect motivations, has no reliable evidentiary support – there is nothing to sustain an assertion that anyone other than Schikaneder was responsible for The Magic Flute’s libretto.³ And a letter ostensibly from Schikaneder to Mozart touching on the composition of the Papageno-Papagena duet in the Act 2 finale is itself strongly suspected of being a forgery.

Also weighing down the study of the work’s genesis is a theory, promoted for decades by one scholar, that the original text of the opera was not the one found in the libretto and in Mozart’s autograph score, but rather an alternative that appears in the earliest published full score issued by Simrock in 1814. The arguments for this view depend largely on aesthetic claims of the superiority of the alternative text’s relationship to the music and an overconfident acceptance of the publisher’s claim to have based his edition on Mozart’s materials.⁴ It is easy to show that the textual changes originated in Hamburg performances that took place after the opera’s Vienna premiere. The text transmitted in Mozart’s score and in the printed Viennese libretto is the original; the variants, while documents of the work’s performance and reception, are not part of its compositional history.⁵ (The revised text arguably fits better in some places; if so, that might tell us something about Mozart’s and Schikaneder’s priorities in creating the work.)

So many commentators found fault with the perceived inconsistencies in the Magic Flute libretto – especially the apparently stark change of perspective between Acts 1 and 2 involving the characterization of the Queen and Sarastro – that this tendency gave rise early in the opera’s reception history to a theory of a midstream change of plan on the part of Mozart and Schikaneder. According to this hypothesis, known in German as the Bruchtheorie, librettist and composer altered their plan for Act 2 after Act 1 was complete; this change is said to explain supposed contradictions and inconsistencies.⁶ A historical reason has even been put forward: Mozart and Schikaneder’s purported concern over competition from Kaspar der Fagottist, a new work staged at a rival theater in June of 1791, which likewise drew on Wieland’s Dschinnistan. The starting point for the story is a letter, probably penned around 1840, reporting a recollection that cannot be confirmed. It is especially telling that the theory was quickly accepted in many quarters in light of literary and dramatic reservations about the libretto.

There is, however, no evidence to support a radical change of plan, and some manuscript evidence that contradicts it. To this, one can add that a sudden change of perspective is unsurprising in this repertory. Act 1 of Schikaneder’s Der Stein der Weisen ends with a decision to board ship for an island to which a central character has been abducted, apparently nothing more than an excuse for a storm and shipwreck (favorite stage effects) that open Act 2. And with the change of setting to the familiar theatrical environs of a magic island come doubts about whether the white demigod Astromonte is indeed good, or the black demigod Eutifronte really is evil. It is no more necessary to postulate a change in plan for The Magic Flute than for this work.⁷

The comparison of The Magic Flute with the collaborative Der Stein der Weisen points up a broader problem in evaluating theories about the genesis of Mozart’s work, and in judging interpretive theories as well. The piece is singular in Mozart’s output: there are no other magic operas, no other works for a suburban theater, and no other operatic collaborations with Schikaneder (aside from Mozart’s small contributions to Der Stein der Weisen and one lost insertion aria from 1780).⁸ We cannot measure theories about this work against Mozart’s usual practices because we do not have any comparable pieces by the composer. This situation has allowed for or even encouraged all kinds of speculation; even the most implausible theory has flourished, in part because it cannot be evaluated in the context of Mozartean norms.

The compositional history of The Magic Flute also became entangled with myths about Mozart’s supposed debauchery and Schikaneder’s purported role in his moral and eventual physical decline. David Buch has shown how writers from Friedrich Schlichtegroll to Otto Jahn, repeating dubiously sourced anecdotes, implied that Mozart came under the influence of a morally loose community at the Theater auf der Wieden while composing The Magic Flute. Along the way they also advanced the undocumented claims that Mozart wrote much of the opera in a shack in the Freihaus, and that he made compositional choices under the inappropriate influence of Barbara Gerl, the first Papagena. None of this appears to be supported by reliable evidence, and these stories represent yet another layer of fiction.⁹

The misinformation and falsehoods associated with The Magic Flute, the relative lack of evidence concerning its genesis, and its character as Mozart’s only magic opera may together be responsible for the unusual interpretive traditions that are now commonly associated with it. In many ways these traditions are not merely unique but extreme, especially those that take the work to be a secretly coded allegory of the power of music, or of Enlightenment, or of Masonry, or of musical politics in Vienna. Often such interpretations offer not just a way of understanding the opera but a theory of its origin – a precompositional plan on the part of Mozart and Schikaneder designed to make a particular allegorical point. For the more thoughtful interpreter, these speculations are as dubious as guides to the work’s origins as they are to its intended meanings. I would suggest that such coded readings have flourished in part because of the relative absence of evidence concerning the work’s creation. For many, they fill a void.¹⁰

Reviewing the Sources

Despite the obstacles to writing a compositional history of The Magic Flute, including the absence of many kinds of information, there is some reliable evidence that has been carefully considered in a number of admirable studies. We can begin with the libretto. Although Schikaneder’s reliance on stories from Dschinnistan was limited, the ones he drew on for The Magic Flute (1791) – together with those from the same collection he used for Oberon (1789), Der Stein der Weisen (1790), Der wohltätige Derwisch (The Beneficent Dervish, 1791), and the Magic Flute sequel Das Labyrinth (1798) – do offer insight into the sort of fairy-tale exotic settings that evidently appealed to the Viennese suburban-theater audience. The Magic Flute might best be regarded as a commercially conceived amalgam of many operatic elements – Eastern exoticism, a rescue plot, spectacles of ritual, low comedy, magic, fairy tales, and so on – and materials like Dschinnistan represent resources from which Schikaneder and Mozart drew. The same might be said with respect to the influence of Masonic ritual; just because it is unlikely that The Magic Flute is a through-and-through Masonic allegory, that does not mean that Mozart and Schikaneder did not draw on Masonic imagery (or on the public’s idea of it).

Then there are the autograph musical materials, which offer a great deal of useful information. At the earliest stage of Mozart’s work are sketches of varying degrees of detail. A surviving draft of the overture records a very different opening for the opera, later rejected. Particularly notable are two sketches for the most complex segments of the two finales. One is the long exchange in accompanied recitative between Tamino and a Priest in Act 1. Most extraordinarily, we have a complete continuity draft in which Mozart worked out the unfolding of the entire scene in minimal scoring before copying the number (almost without change) into his full score. The other is the song of the two Armored Men in the Act 2 finale, where we can see Mozart drafting a contrapuntally supported cantus firmus setting.¹¹

The main musical source is, of course, Mozart’s autograph composing score, a document that has been the subject of fascination for almost two centuries. As early as 1829 the publisher Johann André issued the overture “in exact agreement with the composer’s manuscript as he drafted, orchestrated, and completed it.”¹² Mozart’s compositional process is depicted by the use of two inks: black mostly for the leading violin lines and for the orchestral bass, and red for the instrumentation in between. This corresponds to the two colors of ink discernible in Mozart’s scores, and to the two customary phases of his creative work. The first involved the drafting of essential lines that defined a movement (this included the vocal lines in a sung piece). Mozart then sent his assistants segments of the score in this skeletal state for a head start in copying role books from which singers could begin to learn their parts. Only when Mozart’s first layer was returned to him did he complete the second stage – the work’s instrumentation – and this full version was the basis for the copying of instrumental parts. André’s 1829 score reproduces these layers in the overture in two colors of ink.

Several studies have since attempted, with mixed success, to go beyond these two layers to a more detailed reconstruction of Mozart’s process: by ink color (up to seventeen supposedly discernible shades),¹³ by distinguishing inks through infrared reflectography and x-ray fluorescence spectography,¹⁴ and by the identification of the various papers Mozart used.¹⁵ To a degree, these studies do suggest the order in which Mozart undertook various movements. And aligning details of the manuscript with Mozart’s few comments in his letters does offer some insight.¹⁶ Mozart also distinguished two stages of composition in the entries in his work catalogue, a main one for twenty-two numbers on September 3, 1791, and a second on September 28 for the Priests’ march and the overture.

But there are limits to what we can know, and some attempts fall short of their claims, such as the assertion that manuscript evidence suggests that Mozart tackled movements and sections by character, and that this, in turn, informs our interpretation of the work’s meaning. Besides the unlikely specificity of the eleven distinct stages the study claims to identify, there is a problem in the implication that characters and their musical-dramatic depiction were Mozart’s priority. This is a view that resonates more with nineteenth-century opera than with works from Mozart’s time, and we do not know what (if anything) Mozart’s particular focus was in composing.¹⁷ Other attempts to interpret details of the score give similarly dubious results, like a close study of the grammatical punctuation marks in the vocal lines.¹⁸ These do not appear to shed much light on the work’s compositional history or on Mozart’s understanding of his settings.

Although Mozart’s score and the printed libretto agree for the most part, there are a few lines present in the printed libretto that Mozart did not set to music: a four-line stanza for Pamina and Papageno in the Act 1 finale; a handful of substituted words; a few lines reassigned to different characters; and an aria with chorus (Sarastro’s “O Isis und Osiris”) that was originally designated just “Chorus” in the libretto. Together, they suggest an original plan for these places and Mozart’s somewhat different realization of them in the end.

Mozart’s autograph score occasionally shows the composer’s rethinking and revision of a drafted movement. (Of course, pieces he discarded or restarted on a fresh page are invisible to us.) Most famous in this regard are his revisions to Pamina and Papageno’s duet No. 7 “Bei Männern welche Liebe fühlen.” Remarkably, he completed the movement (including the filling-out stage) and then, as an afterthought, shifted the bar lines throughout, moving the music from one half of each measure to the other.

The rebarring of the movement may also be connected with a detail of its opening. In Mozart’s autograph, the brief instrumental introduction consists only of an initial gesture from the strings; the answering phrase in the woodwinds, now infinitely familiar, is not present. The missing measures (if that is what they are) are known from other eighteenth-century sources, and this points to the value of early secondary copies of the work that are potential witnesses to lost sources connected with the Theater auf der Wieden.¹⁹ The earliest sources that transmit the additional woodwind measure, for example, are score copies and a printed piano-vocal score thought to have originated in Vienna. Viennese copyists, including some with direct connections to Schikaneder’s theater, may have had access to authentic materials reflecting Mozart’s revisions. Definitive answers to the questions here depend on establishing the origins of each of the sources of The Magic Flute and their relationship to each other, an ongoing task involving many uncertainties. To the extent that these differences represent changes made in the course of staging the work, they document the opera’s compositional history.

Evidence from Early Performances

Other sources may offer evidence of early performances of The Magic Flute and additional insight into its earliest history. For example, some early manuscript copies were apparently connected with productions in Frankfurt and other places. Although changes made there are too distant from Mozart and Schikaneder to be considered part of the work’s genesis – they represent its early reception instead – the demonstrable origin of the scores or their ultimate models from Vienna opens the possibility that they are derived from sources close to the original production. More directly, some manuscript materials – a score copy from 1796 and some performing parts – have been identified as stemming from the Theater auf der Wieden itself.²⁰ It is difficult to know how many of the numerous changes reflected in them might stem from the first production or even from 1796 (given the long use to which these parts were put). But they do show how this sort of opera – and this piece in particular, in the theater in which it was created – underwent changes once it hit the stage.

And this material raises an important question: Do alterations made by Schikaneder after Mozart’s death represent part of the work’s genesis and authorized revision, or are they, too, part of its early reception? For example, Mozart’s autograph and the printed libretto each provide only two stanzas of Papageno’s first song, “Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja.” But as early as 1792 or 1793 Viennese copies of the score include a third stanza. Is this third stanza an authentic part of The Magic Flute? The answer depends somewhat on one’s view of the fixity of the opera’s text. It has been argued that the addition of stanzas to strophic songs like Papageno’s was part of the improvisational tradition of comic theater in Vienna. Indeed, there are surviving printed texts from 1795, 1801, and 1802 that document Schikaneder’s continuous addition to and substitution of verses in this number; one writer has gone so far as to suggest that we cannot perform The Magic Flute as “originally as possible” without introducing some creative variation like this.²¹ But we do not have to believe in the concept of an “original” performance to take seriously the contributions of Mozart’s co-creator of the opera even after the composer was gone.

There are two lessons to be drawn from the evidence of The Magic Flute’s early performances. One is that the kind of stability we might be tempted to associate with a work as venerated as this opera is not borne out by its history; it changed even in the hands of its creators. The other is that we probably need to take Schikaneder’s revisions seriously, even though they were made after Mozart’s death. If things had unfolded the other way around, with Schikaneder predeceasing Mozart, we would presumably consider changes made by Mozart alone in later Viennese performances to be part of the work’s compositional history. At the least, we need to keep in mind how quickly works like this changed and to refine our sense of where composition and creation end and performance history starts.

In some cases, evidence of early performances has been misinterpreted. A particularly interesting example involves a printed libretto annotated by Giesecke, believed to be a prompter’s copy from the Theater auf der Wieden. The term “quodlibet” appears twice in its annotations, before scenes 2 and 20 of Act 2. Various interpreters have suggested that the word may have indicated the site of inserted or optional musical numbers, reflecting variety from performance to performance.²² This is especially tempting because of the near-contemporary popularity of musical quodlibets that combined tunes from favorite operas,²³ and of the Viennese stage genre itself known as the quodlibet that flourished not long after the time of The Magic Flute, both of which use the term to refer to music with sung text.²⁴

But the placement of the term “quodlibet” in the prompt book makes it far more likely that the word refers to stage décor, not to an inserted musical number. Contemporary dictionaries first define “quodlibet” as referring to things juxtaposed without order or coherence, to miscellanies, or to mishmashes. “Quodlibet” in the prompt book was almost certainly a shorthand reference to a set or backdrop depicting ruins and debris, a sort of setting documented in contemporary magic operas in Vienna. This understanding lines up with the mysterious frontispiece engraving of The Magic Flute’s printed libretto (see Figure 4.9 earlier in this volume), which depicts just such a scene, and with the text’s description of a half-stage setting in Act 2 as “a short courtyard of the temple, where are seen ruins of fallen columns and pyramids.” Although some variation from performance to performance is possible, it does not appear that this was intended by the word “quodlibet” in the prompt book.

There is some further evidence hinting at the opera’s original staging and décor. The printed libretto contains an engraved illustration of Schikaneder in his Papageno costume, but the background of the illustration is also potentially informative: it aligns strikingly with elements of stage décor described in the libretto, including “climbable mountains” and a round temple (see Figure 4.2 earlier in this volume). The Egyptian theme shared with Der Stein der Weisen and the likelihood that some of that opera’s decorations were reused for The Magic Flute might give further hints of its appearance onstage. And it raises the possibility that the available sets from Der Stein der Weisen, themselves almost certainly adaptations of stock settings, were part of the raw material of The Magic Flute – that is, part of its compositional history.

Some early interventions in the opera raise interesting questions about later changes to the work. In 1802 Schikaneder announced the addition of two new numbers to a revival of The Magic Flute. The status of these pieces would be complex enough if they were known to have been composed by somebody else, but Schikaneder claimed that they were by Mozart. It is not known for certain what these two numbers might have been. One was possibly a surviving duet for Tamino and Papageno, “Pamina, wo bist du?,” but the duet is generally regarded as not by Mozart.²⁵ These added numbers potentially challenge several assumptions: that everything that happened to The Magic Flute after Mozart’s death represents inauthentic tampering with the work; that additions to the opera, even those authored by Schikaneder, do not constitute a part of the work’s compositional history if they took place after December 1791; and that additions to the opera authorized by Schikaneder (with texts presumably by him) are not part of the work’s genesis if their settings are not by Mozart.

In fact, Schikaneder was credited with the music of various stage pieces, though whether as composer or arranger is sometimes not clear. Sources associated with the Theater auf der Wieden, for example, occasionally attribute either a number or its tune to him; and a large collection of anecdotes whose authenticity is difficult to evaluate describes his musical collaboration with composers, Mozart included.²⁶ It thus seems possible that some music in The Magic Flute, while unquestionably Mozart’s in its fully realized form, may have started with melodic ideas from Schikaneder, particularly the strophic songs and duets in which his character participates. However it might have unfolded, this process is surely a potential part of the work’s genesis, though one that is difficult to trace in sources.

The elusiveness of The Magic Flute’s genesis and the misleading impression of its fixed text has contributed to the interpretive burden that has been laid on the opera. Even if we turn away from various invented chapters in the story of the work’s creation, and from critical judgments that condemn the work from the start (a flawed collaborative libretto reflecting a sudden change in plans, a work of Mozartean genius contaminated by demands of a comic actor, and so on), we are still left with the assumption, frequently made by critics and commentators, that the opera sprung fully formed from the minds of Schikaneder and Mozart. The resulting tendency to regard the work as a perfect and unified whole has opened the door to a host of dubious symbolic or allegorical readings that are not supported by the sources or by what we know about late eighteenth-century opera.

A recent discovery suggests the extent to which aspects of the work were, in fact, in flux. A newspaper report of the opera’s premiere published in the Münchner Zeitung gave its title not as The Magic Flute but as The Egyptian Mysteries.²⁷ This title’s emphasis on the opera’s Oriental Egyptianness is striking – it is, after all, a work with two prayerful numbers addressed to Isis and Osiris, an invocation of the “Mysteries of Isis” by the two Armored Men, and repeated references to pyramids in the stage directions. But the report (admittedly secondhand) suggests that elements of the work, right down to its title, were fluid throughout its creation. And it reminds us that our view of the opera’s creation is severely limited by the lack of sources. At the same time, this discovery can remind us that there is more to learn and that we are indeed capable of enlightenment on the topic of The Magic Flute’s compositional history.

The Magic Flute is at once a witty operatic fairy tale and a celebration of love, wisdom, and self-discovery as serious as Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It is both a “popular entertainment with songs”¹ and a work of spiritual intensity that Nicholas Till infers may express Mozart’s disenchantment with “the shallowness of the Enlightenment’s secularized ethical systems.”² It movingly explores the emotional development of a serious and a comic pair of lovers, as Edward Dent pointed out.³ And, as Brigid Brophy⁴ among others has painstakingly researched, it is in part a Masonic allegory, which also refers to the Classical myth of Orpheus. The Magic Flute’s dramatic and musical variety has made it one of the world’s most popular operas. But it has often challenged directors, who have worried about supposedly nonsensical, racist, or sexist elements in the libretto and struggled to mold the opera’s fantastical, comic, and serious aspects into a visually and dramatically coherent whole.

Mozart’s letters to his wife during the first weeks of performances imply that he at least was wholly satisfied with Schikaneder’s libretto and with the opera’s combination of comedy and profundity. He was delighted that his seven-year-old son Carl enjoyed the piece, and he himself relished its humor and playfulness, as he related in a letter to his wife, Constanze, on October 8–9, 1791:

This anecdote makes it clear that Mozart intended The Magic Flute to be entertaining and had great fun in helping to make it so himself. But it is equally clear, from earlier passages in this letter and from two other letters to Constanze, that he considered the opera to be far more than a lighthearted, popular entertainment. Its serious aspects mattered deeply to him. He was keen that his mother-in-law, who, because of either musical ignorance or poor hearing, would “see the opera, but not hear it,”⁶ should read the libretto in advance. He was enraged by a “know-all … Bavarian”⁷ who found the solemn opening scene of Act 2 funny, despite the composer’s attempts to explain it to him. He was thrilled when Salieri and the soprano Caterina Cavalieri admired both The Magic Flute’s libretto and its music and declared it “an operone [grand opera] – worthy to be performed for the grandest festival and before the greatest monarch.”⁸ And what pleased Mozart most was not the fact that Schikaneder’s theater was invariably packed, nor the encores for some numbers, nor even the success of the comic scenes, but the “silent approval”⁹ that conveyed how seriously the audience took the piece.

The initial production of The Magic Flute remained a popular triumph despite some criticism from connoisseurs, notably Count Karl von Zinzendorf, who declared the opera “an incredible farce” while admitting that its music was “pretty.”¹⁰ The Magic Flute went on to enjoy great success in German-speaking countries, where audiences appreciated its music and story, and its serious and comic elements, alike. Both Goethe (who attempted to write a sequel) and E. T. A. Hoffmann considered the work a masterpiece, while at the Berlin Court Opera in 1816 Karl Friedrich Schinkel was inspired by its magical-mythic ambience and Schikaneder’s detailed stage instructions to create stunning designs, including a star-swept sky and a majestic Egyptian temple. But even in Germany and Austria the opera underwent some striking transformations. These included a 1793 Passau production that presented Tamino as an Arthurian knight; a Weimar staging in 1794 for which Christian August Vulpius (Goethe’s brother-in-law) rewrote much of the libretto and made Sarastro the Queen’s brother-in-law; a Dresden and Prague production in Italian the same year; and parodies such as Schikaneder’s mockery of the unlucky Vienna Court Opera production (Theater an der Wien, 1801) and Karl Meisl and Wenzel Müller’s Die falsche Zauberflöte (Theater in der Leopoldstadt, Vienna, 1818–19), which featured Sarastro’s brotherhood riding an early version of the bicycle.

In countries unused to German Singspiel, The Magic Flute underwent more drastic alterations. Paris Opéra audiences first heard it in 1801, transformed into a four-act French grand opéra, Les Mystères d’Isis. The score, arranged by Ludwig Wenzel Lachnith, consisted of heavily edited extracts from The Magic Flute and other Mozart operas plus part of Haydn’s “Drumroll” Symphony, while librettist Étienne Morel de Chédeville maintained only the bare bones of Schikaneder’s plot and renamed most of the characters. Les Mystères remained in repertory for more than twenty years, to the fury of Berlioz, who admired the original’s “religious splendours”¹¹ and felt that “Mozart a été assassiné par Lachnith.”¹² In England, impresarios tended to dislike the comic Papageno scenes, which James Robinson Planché cut to a minimum in his 1838 English-language version,¹³ and The Times (1851) was not alone in sneering at “the stupidity of Schikaneder and the libretto.”¹⁴ For years, London chiefly staged Die Zauberflöte as a vehicle for star singers such as Giulia Grisi and her husband Mario (Pamina and Tamino at Covent Garden in 1851) and performed it in Italian as Il flauto magico, with recitatives replacing the dialogue. Only with Edward Dent’s 1911 English-language version with the dialogue restored, first staged in Cambridge by Clive Carey, did critics begin to appreciate the opera: The Times finally admitted that Mozart’s music “binds the story into a coherent psychological whole.”¹⁵ Carey’s production, in Dent’s translation, was later staged at the Old Vic by Lilian Baylis’s company in 1920, and went on to become a staple of Sadler’s Wells Opera. The Magic Flute also received productions at Covent Garden (generally sung in English) in the 1920s and 1930s and made its Glyndebourne debut in 1935 sung in German. However, it was only after World War II that the opera began to achieve the popularity in the United Kingdom and other non-German-speaking countries that it enjoys today.

The Magic Flute’s growing international success from the 1950s onwards was partly due to several beautiful productions designed by distinguished artists. Oscar Kokoschka’s uncharacteristically playful visuals for the Salzburg Festival (1955) included a dancing donkey, cockerel, goat, and cat. At the Metropolitan Opera, New York (1967), Marc Chagall’s richly colored designs featured his characteristic Russian fairy-tale imagery and fantastical creatures (the closest The Magic Flute has come visually to The Firebird!). Maurice Sendak, who felt Chagall had imposed a “shtetl symbolism” on the work,¹⁶ created inventive designs for the Houston Grand Opera (1980) that blended fairy-tale imagery reminiscent of his children’s books with Egyptian and Enlightenment elements.¹⁷ And at Glyndebourne (1978), David Hockney – inspired both by Schinkel’s 1816 Berlin designs and a visit to the ancient sites of Egypt – made an entire magical world from thirty-five painted backdrops plus minimal scenery and props.¹⁸ Directors during this period tended to concentrate on straightforward storytelling. Andrew Porter praised Günther Rennert’s direction at the Metropolitan Opera in 1967 for its “directness, naturalness … supple response to all the diverse elements.”¹⁹ Much the same can be said of the directing style of John Cox at Glyndebourne and of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle in his elegant, yet playful, Salzburg production to his own designs (both 1978) and of Göran Järvefelt in his Welsh National Opera staging designed by Carl Friedrich Oberle (1979), which “balanced human comedy simultaneously with deep seriousness” and emphasized the characters’ humanity.²⁰

However, some discomfort about Schikaneder’s libretto remained. W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman found it “peculiarly silly”²¹ and made major edits in their 1956 English-language version for an American television production. They cut much of the dialogue and transformed the rest – adding their own new material – into heroic rhyming couplets. They reordered some musical numbers in Act 2, so that the Queen’s “Der Hölle Rache” followed Pamina’s aria and her trio with Sarastro and Tamino, as “the effect of Monostatos and her mother upon [Pamina] would be a much greater temptation to suicidal despair if she had to endure [their cruelty] after she imagines her lover has deserted her … .”²² They also added a lengthy metalogue for Sarastro to declaim between the acts – in which he muses on the opera’s enduring appeal in 1956 (“Though Papageno, one is sad to feel/Prefers the juke-box to the glockenspiel”²³) – and a wry postscript for Astrafiammante (the Queen of the Night). These, though witty, can come close to sending up the opera, while the incessant heroic couplets seem excessively florid.

Ingmar Bergman, who adored The Magic Flute, made a subtler attempt to address the libretto’s problems in his joyful 1975 Swedish-language television film Trollflöjten, a celebration of eighteenth-century stagecraft set chiefly in a studio replica of the Drottningholm Court Theater. His most significant change was to make the Queen of the Night and Sarastro into Pamina’s estranged parents: this makes Sarastro’s actions easier to understand and eradicates any sense that Mozart and Schikaneder changed their minds about which was the “good” character.²⁴ In addition, Bergman gave his benign Sarastro a Wagnerian dimension by having him retire in favor of Tamino and Pamina and, as in Goethe’s planned sequel, leave his community to become a wanderer. (Bergman further stressed the Wagnerian connection by showing the singer of Sarastro studying Parsifal in the interval.) He also removed explicit Masonic and Egyptian references to focus on more universal themes of love, wisdom, and compassion, expunged mentions of Monostatos’s dark skin, and reordered and cut parts of Act 2.²⁵

Despite these changes, Bergman, like Auden and Kallman, had great respect for The Magic Flute’s essential scenario and left it, for the most part, intact. But, with the rise of Regietheater in the 1980s and 1990s, directors began to take greater liberties as they sought to demystify the work. At the Scottish Opera in 1983 Jonathan Miller (who had no love for myth) transformed the enmity between the Queen and Sarastro into a battle between the Catholic Church and the eighteenth-century Freemasons, presented as the dream of an Enlightenment scholar who falls asleep in a library and imagines himself as Tamino. While this interpretation may have shed light on the opera’s historical-political context, Robert Grant felt that it reduced The Magic Flute to merely “a quaint memorial to bygone ideology.”²⁶ More iconoclastic still was Peter Sellars’s Glyndebourne production (1990). Sellars, who saw the opera as a scary “confused power struggle,”²⁷ relocated the action to contemporary Los Angeles, with Tamino as a hippy dropout, Papageno as a beach bum, the Queen of the Night as a bourgeois housewife, and Sarastro as a cult leader. This was not wholly perverse; as Times Literary Supplement critic Christopher Wintle pointed out, the 1776 American Declaration of Independence expressed ideals similar to those of eighteenth-century Freemasonry, while the Los Angeles setting articulated “the perpetual quest of the deracinated for exotic cults.”²⁸ However, Sellars’s decisions to omit all dialogue and replace it with explanatory neon signs; to combine the contemporary setting with stylized gestures inspired by Indian, Indonesian, and Japanese theater; to make Tamino’s flute-playing seem ridiculous; and to turn Sarastro’s brotherhood into a “collection of morally ambiguous drop-outs” ultimately reduced the production to little more than “a lampoon by a sparky student.”²⁹ Its disastrous reception led Glyndebourne’s artistic director Peter Hall to resign.

In the twenty-first century, directors have responded in an extraordinary variety of ways to The Magic Flute’s mixture of knockabout comedy, spiritual seriousness, and magic, and its potentially racist and misogynist elements. A few have explored the opera’s serious themes in a secular, modern context. Kenneth Branagh – perhaps inspired by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson’s The Magic Flute: A Fantasia – set his 2006 film The Magic Flute at the height of World War I, with Tamino as a frontline soldier and Sarastro the chief doctor in a field hospital. Peter Brook’s free, much-abridged adaptation A Magic Flute (2011) pared back the opera’s magical and pantomime aspects to focus on the emotional development of its two young couples. And Robert Carsen (Baden-Baden and Opéra Bastille, 2013–14) staged The Magic Flute as a rite of passage from adolescence to adulthood in which the younger generation came to terms with death – which Carsen noted is mentioned sixty times in Schikaneder’s libretto.³⁰ Everyone wore simple black and white contemporary clothes (except Papageno and Papagena, who looked like hippy backpackers), and the Queen of the Night and Sarastro worked together to guide the lovers through trials in what appeared to be a woodland cemetery and crypt. Throughout, Carsen minimized the opera’s fantasy elements to focus on humanitarian themes of community and compassion.

Other recent directors have had less optimistic visions – particularly as regards Sarastro. Netia Jones (Garsington, 2018) portrayed him as a pompous modern Freemason,³¹ who kept the women at his lodge (dressed in costumes reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale) in servitude. Martin Kušej (Zurich Opera, 2007) made Sarastro into a dubious guru (though the nymphomaniac Queen of the Night was still worse) based in a charmless grey basement. During Act 2 he submitted Pamina and Tamino – here, a couple separated on their wedding day and presumably rendered amnesiac – to harrowing ordeals culminating in a trial by water in which they escaped from a submerged car. In the finale he dispassionately proclaimed victory as they recovered on hospital beds before returning to their initial bridal pose, which implied the entire opera was their hallucination. David Pountney offered an equally disturbing, if more fantastical, interpretation in his 2013 Bregenz Festival production, set on a primitive island ruled by a villainous, brutal Sarastro. (Pountney stated that, unlike Mozart and Schikaneder, he believes Sarastro “belongs in jail.”³²) Everything about the island was frightening, not least the grotesque life-sized marionettes symbolizing the Three Ladies and the Three Boys, sung offstage. In the finale, the Queen and Sarastro murdered each other, while Tamino and Pamina escaped with relief into the audience’s modern world.

If Pountney criticized The Magic Flute’s philosophical and mystical aspects, another set of directors have cheerfully ignored them and staged the work as pantomime. Achim Freyer followed his Salzburg Festival production (1997), set in a circus tent with the characters as clowns, with a 2006 Semperoper Dresden staging to his own designs with more clown imagery and brightly colored, inflated costumes that drew comparisons with the Teletubbies.³³ Pierre Audi and COBRA artist Karel Appel created an equally colorful Dutch National Opera (1995) and Salzburg Festival (2006) Magic Flute, with mock-primitive sculptures, mountaineering Ladies and a dreadlocked Papageno in an orange car accompanied by yellow birds reminiscent of Sesame Street. In Adrian Noble’s 2004 Glyndebourne production, cheerful animal imagery dominated so much that The Observer’s Anthony Holden complained Sarastro’s court was “reduced to an outtake from The Lion King.”³⁴ And Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier’s postmodern Vienna State Opera staging (2013) included Three Ladies from vaudeville, levitating musical instruments and Boys, pyrotechnics, a comic menagerie, and ballet-dancing policemen, and reduced Sarastro’s noble brotherhood to dark-suited, handshaking businessmen (perhaps an ironic reference to Freemasonry). Pantomimic productions can have serious aspects – Audi movingly depicted Pamina’s conflicted feelings about her mother and Sarastro, while Leiser and Caurier made Papageno touching rather than imbecilic. But at worst they reduce The Magic Flute to farce, as with Jonathan Moore’s updated 2003 Scottish Opera production, which started on the moon with an astronaut Tamino and ended at Sarastro’s multifaith Isis and Osiris Mission; or Yuval Sharon’s 2019 Berlin Opera staging, in which the characters were puppets inspired by pop culture, the cast performed uncomfortable acrobatics, and the opera was revealed to be a play staged by children whose prerecorded voices spoke the dialogue. Sharon’s production, which also featured a nonsinging actor as Papageno, was so disliked that one critic dubbed it “the tragic flute.”³⁵

Technology has played a major part in several reinventions of The Magic Flute. In his 2012 Dutch National Opera production (which replaced Nicholas Hytner’s 1988 classic staging at the English National Opera in 2013), Simon McBurney used video projections, puppetry, and live sound art to create a contemporary equivalent to Schikaneder’s much-admired 1791 stage effects. Sometimes he succeeded, as in the trial by water, where Tamino and Pamina appeared to swim. However, McBurney’s eagerness to rid the work of “confectionery”³⁶ through a single, minimalist set and plain, modern costumes – Sarastro and Papageno looked like a 1970s French intellectual and a tramp, while the Queen was a crippled black-clad crone – resulted in a rather drab staging that The Guardian’s Martin Kettle felt fell “frustratingly short of the great enlightenment experience that Mozart’s music demands.”³⁷ Projections dominated to an even greater extent in William Kentridge’s 2005 staging for La Monnaie, Brussels, subsequently performed by several international companies, including La Scala, Milan (with a recording in 2011). The South African artist-director used his characteristic black-and-white animated drawings throughout, not only to illustrate the opera’s story but also to explore his own lifelong preoccupation with colonialism: his Sarastro was an overbearing nineteenth-century imperialist overlord.³⁸

But the most radical use of video art came from Barrie Kosky, working with Paul Barritt and Suzanne Andrade from London theater group 1927 at the Komische Oper Berlin (2012). Kosky believes that The Magic Flute is not an opera but “end-of-the-pier meets panto meets Mozart’s profound music meets vaudeville,”³⁹ and he and 1927 reworked it as a mixture of animated film and live action inspired by cartoons and 1920s silent cinema. The innumerable animations included a dancing black cat, baying dogs, a nude fairy (the flute), flowers, hearts, bells, and pink elephants. The singers often sang frozen in movie spotlights. Pamina became a Louise Brooks lookalike, Papageno Buster Keaton, the Queen was a fiendish cartoon spider, and the serious Sarastro was banished to a high shelf at the back of the stage. To heighten the silent-movie ambiance, Kosky removed the spoken dialogue and replaced it with libretto extracts projected on screens, accompanied by Mozart fantasias performed on a fortepiano. The production’s inventive visuals have made it a worldwide success, but at the Edinburgh Festival in 2015 Kate Molleson noted that erasing the dialogue left little space for character development,⁴⁰ while The Observer’s Fiona Maddocks found the perpetual animations exhausting and felt that “Mozart’s music [was] knocked into the background.”⁴¹

Kosky’s is one of several productions that feels conceptually a long way from Mozart and Schikaneder’s scenario. Dominic Cooke’s 2005 Welsh National Opera staging was an homage to René Magritte. Radical theater group La Fura dels Baus (Ruhr Triennale, 2003/Opéra Bastille, 2005) set The Magic Flute inside a brain, with twelve giant inflatable blocks symbolizing “the units of memory,”⁴² and replaced the dialogue with text by poet Rafael Argullol, declaimed by actors. Lydia Steier (Salzburg Festival, 2018) turned it into a fairy tale that was narrated to well-off Viennese siblings by their grandfather on the eve of World War I. James Brining (Opera North, 2019) made it the sinister dream of a small girl who falls asleep playing a record of The Magic Flute and imagines her parents’ dinner guests as the characters. Inspired by the conflict between religious and secular education since the French Revolution, Damiano Michieletto (La Fenice, Venice, 2015) set the action in a modern school. Tamino, Pamina, and Monostatos were pupils, Papageno the illiterate janitor, the Queen of the Night a pious Catholic mama attended by three nuns, and Sarastro a kindly humanist headmaster, who devised trials including a woodland camping trip and a spelling test. And at Glyndebourne in 2019 André Barbe and Renaud Doucet, who denounced The Magic Flute as “racist and mostly very sexist,”⁴³ offered an irreverent feminist interpretation set in Vienna’s Hotel Sacher in 1900, and possibly the dream of a hotel guest (Tamino). The Queen was modelled on the eccentric hotelier Anna Sacher, Sarastro was her head chef, and Monostatos the soot-dyed boilerman. Suffragettes turned up in Act 2 to highlight the misogyny of Sarastro’s kitchen realm, and Pamina defiantly donned a male suit for the trials of fire and water, described by The Stage’s opera critic George Hall as a “period edition of Masterchef Vienna”⁴⁴ – with Tamino doing the washing-up.

While many recent productions of The Magic Flute are ingeniously inventive, they rarely capture the rich variety of Mozart and Schikaneder’s opera. The dramatic pathos and noble music that dominate Act 2 make little sense in sinister productions such as Pountney’s, or farcical ones such as Freyer’s or Sharon’s. Humanist stagings such as Carsen’s may capture the opera’s compassion, but invariably lack the original’s imaginative scope and element of fantasy. And more radical reworkings of the piece, such as Kosky’s or Barbe and Doucet’s, often appear to tell a story very different from the original and give credence to Robert Grant’s statement that, “far from clarifying or expanding [an opera’s] meaning, the ‘concept production’ actually narrows and obscures it.”⁴⁵ Above all, many Magic Flute productions since the 1980s lack what Ingmar Bergman felt was the opera’s essential appeal: its unique combination of “childish magic and exalted mystery.”⁴⁶

Fortunately, a few directors have relished these aspects of The Magic Flute – to the delight of their audiences. Julie Taymor’s exotic fairy-tale production for the Metropolitan Opera (2004) was hailed by The New Yorker’s Alex Ross as “a shimmering cultural kaleidoscope, with all manner of mystical and folk traditions blending together.”⁴⁷ Taymor believes The Magic Flute is “like Shakespeare … it’s like an elevator … you can get off on any level … . You can enjoy it for … the basic magical fairy-tale outline, or you can sit there and ponder the deeper thoughts behind it.”⁴⁸ Her witty staging included playful life-sized puppets such as the silk bears who danced to Tamino’s flute, Papageno’s prancing birds, and the Three Boys’ bird-kite. But George Tsypin’s designs also paid tribute to the work’s solemn Masonic and Egyptian aspects, and Taymor depicted Pamina and Tamino’s emotional ordeals very movingly. Her production and a subsequent cut-down English-language version of it for children have been regularly staged at the Met for years. Peter Stein’s 2016 production for La Scala’s Accademia training program was equally well received. Unlike many contemporary directors, Stein admires the libretto – which he notes explores themes that also feature in Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, and Wagner operas – and feels that Pamina’s position as Tamino’s fellow-initiate and guide through the trials ensures that the piece is not sexist.⁴⁹ His simple, concept-free staging follows Schikaneder’s stage instructions precisely, even to the lions that pull Sarastro’s chariot. While his grass-skirted savage Monostatos raised a few critics’ eyebrows, Stein’s production was a sellout success at its premiere and moved a subsequent Amazon reviewer of its DVD recording to give it a standing ovation.⁵⁰

Mozart’s anger at the Bavarian who laughed at the opening of Act 2 implies that The Magic Flute’s idealistic and spiritual aspects had personal significance for him. The two productions – still going strong as of 2020 – that best capture this, and a general sense of late-Enlightenment idealism, are David McVicar’s (Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, 2003) and the late August Everding’s (Bavarian State Opera, 1978), which both present Sarastro and his Priests not as austere mythical figures but, to quote Everding’s designer Jürgen Rose, as “human beings who could have been Mozart’s contemporaries.”⁵¹ The directors’ insightful depictions of the young couples’ emotional development – particularly Pamina’s progress from victim to courageous heroine – and their radiantly joyous Act 2 finales likewise encourage us to feel the enlightenment espoused by Sarastro is worth striving for. But neither director neglects the opera’s fantastical and funny elements: both include spectacular appearances for the otherworldly Queen of the Night and for the Three Boys in their flying machine, a genuinely magical flute and bells, charming dancing animals, laugh-out-loud humor in the Papageno scenes, and prominent parts for children – including delightful little Papageni – that remind one of The Magic Flute’s appeal for all ages.

In some respects, these two productions are very different – there is, after all, no definitive way to stage The Magic Flute. Everding uses Jürgen Rose’s exquisitely detailed backdrops and scenery to adhere closely to Schikaneder’s many scene changes and staging instructions, does not depart significantly from the original story – Monostatos remains a Moor, for example – and primarily sticks to a mixture of fairy-tale and eighteenth-century imagery. (Both Everding and McVicar, like Bergman in his film, avoid explicit Egyptian references.) McVicar and his designer John Macfarlane choose a simpler look – a single dark, marble set that periodically opens to reveal colored backdrops such as a starry sky, a flowering tree, or a golden sunrise – and playfully mix periods by having Papageno and Papagena in more modern dress than the other characters. They go for a stylized rather than literal staging of the animals dancing to Tamino’s flute and the trials of fire and water, with actors who don animal heads onstage and illustrate the trials through movement. And McVicar excises any racism by making Monostatos a creepy eighteenth-century European dandy, and highlights the potential misogyny in Sarastro’s court more than Everding⁵² by showing how the women there are marginalized until Pamina’s initiation.

But what Everding and McVicar crucially have in common is their willingness to engage with Schikaneder’s story as seriously as did Mozart, rather than alter it substantially, mock it, or largely discard it for their own new concept. Equally, they pay constant attention to how the musical score informs characterization and action, something McVicar says is key to all his opera productions,⁵³ so that there is no disjunction between what one sees and what one hears. As with Taymor and Stein, past directors such as Cox and Järvefelt, or Bergman in his ever-popular film, they thus allow audiences to enjoy the opera’s comic, fantastical, and profound aspects equally, and to feel it all makes perfect sense, just as, to quote novelist Barbara Trapido, “a dream makes sense … deeply, at the center of [your] being.”⁵⁴ Mozart, who relished The Magic Flute’s unique mixture of wit and profundity so much, would surely would have been delighted.

Any discussion about The Magic Flute and film will quite naturally concern itself with Ingmar Bergman’s celebrated 1975 production. The Magic Flute is a very distinct entry in Bergman’s oeuvre. Further, it is a distinct, distinguished example of a very rare and particular kind of movie. It stands with so much of Georges Méliès, with the first Marx Brothers features, with René Clair’s Le Million, Sacha Guitry’s Story of a Cheat, Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, Carné/Prévert’s Children of Paradise, Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes and Tales of Hoffman, Chaplin’s The Circus and Limelight, and Jean Renoir’s The Golden Coach as one of the preeminent and most beautiful examples of what we might call the theatrical film. The theatrical film is no simple adaptation, no mere derivation, nor is it a case of cinema subordinating itself to a parent art. In his Images, Bergman himself describes and celebrates this merging of the theatrical and the cinematic as he recollects his own youthful visit to Stockholm’s eighteenth-century Drottningholm Court Theater, and a dear ambition that was seeded there.

The theatrical film, like its ancestor the Singspiel, can be simultaneously heightened and plain, artificial and conversational. It emphasizes equally the tale and its telling. In doing so it contemplates and integrates notions of artifice and reality, creation and reception, even nature and culture.

Bergman’s Magic Flute does all that, and more. Mozart’s Figaro and Così stand as supreme examples of a comic tradition that boasts countless other supreme examples. His last opera is much more singular. For many, it is the preeminent specimen of its genre, and as such it has been performed and celebrated through the centuries. But Theodor Adorno, famously, makes a case for a more complex view: “The Magic Flute, in which the Utopia of the Enlightenment and the pleasure of a light opera comic song precisely coincide, is a moment by itself. After The Magic Flute it was never again possible to force serious and light music together.”²

In this oft-cited quotation lies much of the melancholy burden of modernity, and of Adorno’s and the Frankfurt School’s intractable integrity. And yet, as is well known, Adorno never really accounted for so much of the post-WWII popular culture that might have challenged this brave, dire assertion. It may indeed be that the Utopias of Enlightenment, of reconciled binaries, and of the Brotherhood of Man, are forever beyond our reach. (Were they ever really within it?) Still, The Magic Flute, and Bergman’s theatrical film version of it especially, most certainly did manage to combine noble seriousness and joyful lightness, even going so far as to bind up some of our most painful historical and cultural wounds.

On the face of it, Ingmar Bergman is an unlikely contributor to this conciliatory project. His early films were angst-ridden melodramas, drawing upon the inspiration of his spiritual forebear, August Strindberg, to portray the painful incompatiblities that so often exist between men and women. As Bergman gained confidence, as he found his voice and style, these conflicts went on to reflect and represent a deeper alienation, speaking to what he saw as the fundamental solitude of life, the irreducible suffering of the human condition.

Bergman would extend these explorations into the arenas of faith and religion, going on to hold forth on the subject of God’s silence, or outright nonexistence. As he did so, he established and refined a more rigorous set of cinematic strategies. This particular brand of modernism would become emblematic of the period’s sense of discontinuity, anxiety, and absurdity. Bergman was an articulate witness to anguished times, and to the existential agony that transcends time.

But if Bergman’s sensibility was compelling and resonant, it also invited – even demanded – interrogation and critique. He lacked ideological concern, and even awareness.³ And at times his morbidity and defeatism seemed to border on the pathological. A young Bergman planned for his staging of a Strindberg play to be “a vision of toiling, weeping, evil-smitten humanity … in all its grotesqueness, its terror and its beauty.”⁴ In middle age, upon receiving a major award at the height of his power and influence, he had this to say about the world and the artist’s place in it:

Bergman’s very sympathetic critical biographer, Peter Cowie, quite justly observed that his “rigid, some would say inflexible, view of the world leads to a certain repetition of themes, doubts, and aspirations. The unremitting obsession with death and betrayal, belief and disillusionment, produced in the fifties and sixties a style ripe for parody … .”⁶ The American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who had very much admired many of Bergman’s films, could still, finally, look back at and characterize his work as “solipsistically self-pitying, spiritually constipated, and utterly without interest in overcoming these flaws.”⁷

All that said and given its due, it is important to note that Bergman’s films are not without their infusions of high spirits, humor, and, especially, tenderness. These latter episodes (i.e., the clown Jof’s luminous vision of the Virgin and Child in The Seventh Seal, the sisters’ placid walk through the park at the conclusion of Cries and Whispers, etc.) are the more uncommonly affecting because of their comparative infrequency and because of the way they leaven the darker films, which in turn brighten the dark times that produced them.

With remarkably few exceptions, Bergman’s Magic Flute is a celebrated, beloved film. It is also quite strikingly distinct from the rest of his oeuvre. On a number of occasions Bergman gave exquisite expression to impulses and impressions that provide a context for understanding what drew him to this opera and what connects this film to moments in his other films. For example, he wrote the following during the production of The Seventh Seal (1957): “I believe a human being carries his or her own holiness, which lies within the realm of the earth; there are no other-worldly explanations. So in the film lives a remnant of my honest, childish piety lying peacefully alongside a harsh and rational perception of reality.”⁸

A decade later he wrote the following in a notebook while preparing for the production of Persona (1966):

In another passage he expresses his hopes for what would in many ways be his testament film, Fanny and Alexander, but this statement might also be applied to his entire work:

These seemingly atypical, wonderfully refreshing comments indicate qualities that are also important parts of Bergman’s sensibility, and of his work. And as it turns out, music – and Mozart – are crucial to the implementation of these ideas.

Alexis Luko provides a thorough study of Bergman’s extensive, detailed, and purposeful use of previously composed classical music in the films.¹¹ Luko had observed, of course, that the intense close-ups for which Bergman has been so noted are very often rife with confrontation, alienation, and agony. She contrasts these familiar qualities with what she calls the “aural closeup,” which is generally marked by the featured, foregrounded presence of classical music on the soundtrack.¹² These aural close-ups often run counter to the harrowing nature of so much of Bergman’s work, featuring as they do these same characters now courteously listening, experiencing brief, incandescent moments of comprehension and connection.¹³

In Bergman’s films these moments are powerful, but glancing. Significantly, they constitute the near entirety of The Magic Flute, which is the only completely concentrated, utterly unmitigated example of harmonious concord in his entire oeuvre.¹⁴ Since Bergman was such a lightning rod, such an uncommonly versatile, prolific, acclaimed, and excoriated artist, his Magic Flute ended up being more than just a striking contrast to the main body of one individual’s film output. It would emerge as a galvanizing contrast to, and even a bright beacon for, international film in general, as well as for the tumultuous decade that it bisected.

Writing toward the end of Bergman’s active career as a film director, Peter Cowie said that “The Magic Flute may well take its place among the five or six greatest films that [he] has directed,”¹⁵ in part because “Bergman’s own predilection for chilly metaphysics had been tempered by Mozart’s sense of wonder.”¹⁶ Jeremy Tambling (in a generally critical analysis) saw the film as an attempted “corrective to the tortured mind of the twentieth century.”¹⁷

All of this was by design, and a consequence of a very particular attitude and process. As mentioned earlier, the theatrical film is not simply a matter of cinematic subordination to a parent art. Bergman’s Magic Flute, for instance, is precisely aware of, and becomes a sophisticated essay about, the relationship between theater/opera and film, and of film’s early grammatical evolution.

That said, Bergman’s Magic Flute is also, decidedly, a modest adaptation, in which its brilliant, morose, and often seething adaptor submits to the sensibilities of the original authors (Schikaneder and Mozart), their inspirations, and the institutions that allowed them to communicate.

The Magic Flute’s opening montage sets the tone for this important, encouraging act of obeisance, and it does so in a couple of important ways.¹⁸ Eight serene, sunsetting establishing shots of the Drottningholm Court Theater¹⁹ and its environs give way to an image of the spectators whom we presume to be sitting inside, and to a shot of one spectator in particular. The camera frames and then zooms in on a red/golden-haired girl of some eight or nine years. It comes to, and holds on, a close-up of her face, which lasts for a full forty-five seconds.

This is Bergman and Liv Ullmann’s daughter, Linn,²⁰ to whom we will return with some frequency throughout the course of the film. She is listening to the opening Adagio of Mozart’s overture. She is also looking, off-frame. Presently, the camera cuts to what she is looking at – namely, an eighteenth-century winged putto painted on the closed curtain at the front of the stage. We cut back to Linn, who now glances over to a draped and helmeted Muse figure seated in billowing clouds. To Linn, again, and now a last cut to the expanse of the curtain in its entirety.

This back-and-forth is known as cinematic suture, and The Magic Flute establishes Linn Ullmann as the site thereof. Suture is a standard technique through which classical (commercial) film spectators are brought into the film space and under the conventions and assumptions that inform and structure it.²¹ It is accomplished by shot-reverse shot sequences in which we see a person looking, cut to what or who she is looking at, then return for her response to the thing she has just seen. In this construction we are introduced to the character with whom we will identify, come to share her space and perspective, see through her eyes, and feel as she feels.

To a degree, Linn is looking at, and about to bear witness to, “the noble, magical illusion of theater.”²² But there is something more, something much more, to her presence here. The deeper significance of this first suturing in The Magic Flute is that we are not completely, or even primarily, being invited to identify with a character in the opera proper. Instead, we identify with a spectator, and with a child at that. This is the sensibility that our suddenly, surprisingly humble director expects or perhaps invites us to assume, at least for the duration of this film.

At a basic level, Bergman’s The Magic Flute is a story for children, and a reflection of the guileless, hopeful spirit of childhood. As in:

And again:

These moving statements, combined, evoke childhood’s exemplary qualities and redemptive, paradisiacal power. These are manifest as Mozart’s serene expository Adagio gives way to the electrifying Allegro, and as the last close-up of this beloved child resolves into what could well be her own bright vision. Now comes The Magic Flute’s celebrated assembly of attentive faces, juxtaposed and multiplying, comprising an impressive, practically comprehensive litany of bone structures and expressions, ages, and ethnicities. This striking, raptly listening legion of facial types is all bound together by the score on the soundtrack.

Motion picture soundtracks are traditionally tasked with binding together a film’s disparate and often disharmonious images. In the nature of its production and assembly, film is a very fragmented medium. Conventional film music, so smooth and flowing, distracts the spectator from this fact. And it has further labors to perform. Most film music is subordinated to the narrative, as well as to the other ideological and commercial functions that motion pictures perform.²⁵ The overture sequence in The Magic Flute reverses this standard hierarchy: its images actually accompany the music and serve to secure and exemplify the story that the music tells.

In some ways, Mozart himself is the story in question. He has not only written this score, but he also represents the musical and cultural ideal that embraces and unites all of these spectators. Since viewers of the film have seen in this opening sequence almost every kind of person that they might imagine – since they have almost certainly seen someone who looks like them – then they too are invited to become part of this communion.

A waggish commentator once suggested that “Ingmar Bergman presented the overture to The Magic Flute (1975) as if it was a Coca-Cola commercial … .”²⁶ This is quite funny, but it is not quite fair. In the context of Bergman’s customary alienation, not to mention 1968, absurdism, Allende, Baader-Meinhof, the cataclysmic end of the Vietnam War, constant clouds of nuclear threat, the FLQ, intractable instability in the Middle East, the implosion of an American presidential administration, if not of American democracy itself, the Khmer Rouge (and East Timor, and on and on), Munich, the OPEC oil embargo, rampant industrial pollution, and the threat of environmental cataclysm, rapacious capitalism with its resultant recessions and oppressions, revolutions, and totalitarianisms all around – surely, in this calamitous context (to say nothing of Bergman’s constant, perpetual sickness unto death), a modest measure of sentiment and even calculated simplicity is not just to be dismissed.²⁷

It is in part because of the tortured twentieth century that Bergman stages his Magic Flute as a story for children. But his staging is not merely escapist, nor at all childish. As its Masonic traces suggest, the opera also contains lessons that both youthful spectators and guileless protagonists can share as together they trace its archetypal passage from guileless innocence, through fiery trial and abiding love, to outright exaltation.

Once again, Ingmar Bergman has with some justice been taken to task for the consistent lack of political engagement in his films. Better, say some, the artist hit nails right on the head, fashioning narratives and even making outright declarations that directly address some aspect of social reality, that raise awareness and lead to needful change. But it could just as much be argued that Bergman left ideological interrogation in other capable hands as he ably explored his own alternative courses for illuminating the human condition.

In his autobiography he describes what he felt to be the opera’s central scene, the one that moved him most profoundly, the one that most motivated him to undertake this adaptation. Tamino, the protagonist, the aspirant, the young hero who is passing through necessary trials on the way to his eventual, glorious apotheosis, is downcast (in the Act 1 finale). He has encountered deceit and dishonor, is discouraged by all the gaps that exist between appearance and reality, between his ardent aspiring and the obstacles that stand in his way:

Bergman had previously used this very sequence in his 1968 horror film, Hour of the Wolf. There, it is performed on the stage of a marionette theater, witnessed by a disintegrating artist and the group of demons who will ultimately consume him. This 1968 quotation was sincere and unsarcastic. It provided a real respite, real refreshment, and it ended, and gave way once again to, despair.

Following this Magic Flute’s bright ascendence, Bergman would in some ways do the very same thing, returning in part, or at least alternatingly, to his dire and even demonic melancholy. The Mozart film was preceded by the exquisite dissolutions of Scenes from a Marriage (1974; also, subsequently, adapted for the stage), succeeded by the marital entropy of Face to Face (1976). On the stage, it was back to Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Strindberg’s Miss Julie.²⁹

But no matter. The Magic Flute provided a refreshing contrast to its director’s deeply resonant but sometimes burdensome output. It provided a refreshing contrast to the troubled films that abounded during that troubling decade. Since that time, The Magic Flute has been continuously available and has become only increasingly visible.³⁰ This is so much the case that it really has begun to pose a serious challenge to Adorno’s previously quoted statement about the Mozart/Schikaneder original. If the opera, as originally produced, was “a moment by itself,” then Bergman’s modest and self-effacing theatrical film has become an ever-renewing, ever-present moment of reconciliation and pleasure.