As one of the most popular and beloved pieces in the operatic repertory, The Magic Flute has received lots of attention in scholarly and critical writing. Perhaps it was the elusive nature of the opera – its perplexing plot twists and at times opaque symbolism – that incited twentieth-century scholars to focus predominantly on locating esoteric meanings (such as Masonic and Rosicrucian symbolism) within the work, meanings that would have been understandable to only a chosen few within the Viennese Mozart circle of the early 1790s. Only recently have researchers such as David Buch and Jörg Krämer started to explore in detail the more public contexts for The Magic Flute, especially the vast body of eighteenth-century fairytale and magical literature. An interest in broadening the scope of scholarly enquiry into the meanings of The Magic Flute was one of the principal aims of this conference.

A large proportion of the conference presentations illuminated multiple levels of meaning within the opera by connecting Schikaneder's libretto and Mozart's musical setting to previously overlooked historical and cultural contexts. In her keynote address Wye Jamison Allanbrook (University of California, Berkeley) called for a more detailed investigation of how The Magic Flute fits into eighteenth-century comedic traditions. Particularly fruitful was her exploration of what she called ‘the stamp of opera buffa on The Magic Flute’, which led to a reading of the opera's conclusion in terms of Italian conventions of lieto fine and an interpretation of Tamino and Pamina as a mezzo carattere couple. Complementing Allanbrook's presentation, my paper (Martin Nedbal, University of Arkansas) focused on how eighteenth-century German theories of national drama and the aesthetic of serious German plays performed in Vienna in the early 1790s informed Mozart's differing treatment of moral maxims in The Magic Flute and in Così fan tutte.

The conference organizer Adeline Mueller (University of California, Berkeley) offered new perspectives on the Queen of the Night and her relationship to Pamina by investigating the representation of mother figures and motherhood in eighteenth-century dramas such as Lessing's Emilia Galotti, Holzbauer and Klein's Günther von Schwarzburg, Gotter and Benda's Medea and Voltaire's Semiramis. Like Mueller, Paul Corneilson (Packard Humanities Institute) paid particular attention to the Queen, yet his insights were based on a detailed biographical discussion of Josepha Hofer, the first Queen of the Night in Mozart's Magic Flute and in the 1798 sequel Das Labyrinth, oder Der Kampf mit den Elementen (with music by Peter Winter).

The conference participants also used visual arts to arrive at new understandings of The Magic Flute. Estelle Joubert (Dalhousie University) discussed how contemporaneous landscape design and descriptions of architecture in fairytale literature of the day might have had an impact on the final shape of the opera's stage sets. Within this historical framework Joubert interpreted Schikaneder's stage descriptions as integral to the educational story line of the opera. In his contribution Peter Hoyt (University of South Carolina) took inspiration from images published in early editions of the opera's vocal score in which Monostatos observes a sleeping Pamina. Hoyt showed how this depiction is consistent with the eighteenth-century erotic iconography of sleeping females and how it thus opens up new interpretative possibilities regarding the construction of Pamina as a sexual being and an object of sexual desire.

Another set of presentations scrutinized the immediate legacy of The Magic Flute in German musical theatre from around 1800. The conference's second keynote speaker, Jane Brown (University of Washington), discussed Goethe's involvement with the staging of the 1794 production of The Magic Flute by the Weimar theatre, the extent of his involvement with Christian Vulpius's revision of Schikaneder's libretto and his own fragmentary sequel to Mozart's opera. Brown argued that Goethe's encounters with The Magic Flute were marked by a tendency to make the original work darker and more serious, and that this feature links the Weimar production and its libretto, as well as Goethe's unfinished sequel, to other portions of Goethe's literary output. Focusing on the lighter side of The Magic Flute's legacy, Heidi Lee (Stanford University) analysed comic devices in the music of Papageno and Papageno-like figures in Winter's aforementioned Das Labyrinth (1798) and Friedrich Himmel's Die Sylphen (1806). Francien Markx (George Mason University) explored issues pertaining to the portrayal of oriental ‘others’ in late eighteenth-century singspiels by comparing Mozart and Schikaneder's depiction of Monostatos to the character of Kaliban in the 1798 North German opera Die Geisterinsel by Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter and Johann Friedrich Reichardt.

The remaining presenters followed the after-The-Magic-Flute story to the present day in a series of richly researched case studies devoted to adaptations of the original work written, published or staged since the early nineteenth century. Rachel Cowgill (Liverpool Hope University) talked about early nineteenth-century adaptations of the opera in England. William Gibbons (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) gave a fascinating account of how differences between the 1865 and the 1909 versions of the opera performed and published in Paris reflected the changing political views and cultural tastes of French society. Francis Maes (Ghent University) and Kristi Brown-Montesano (Colburn Conservatory of Music), by contrast, focused on more recent resonances of The Magic Flute. Brown-Montesano spoke about the process of transforming The Magic Flute into books and movies intended for children. Among other issues, she posed the question of whether and to what extent these adaptations can and should simplify the complex story of the opera – and of how they deal with the work's explicitly racist elements. Maes took up Karol Berger's recent interpretation of certain elements within the opera (especially the character of Sarastro) as illustrating the sometimes paradoxical ideological foundations of twentieth-century totalitarianism and colonialism and used it as the framework for a close reading of William Kentridge's 2006 production of The Magic Flute at the Théâtre de la Monnaie (Brussels).

Extended excerpts from Kentridge's production were shown during the conference. In fact, Adeline Mueller was able to bring together a whole collection of film material related to The Magic Flute. On the opening evening participants were charmed by Lotte Reiniger's 1935 animated movie Papageno. The following afternoon offered screenings, introduced by James Davies (University of California, Berkeley) and Sheila Boniface-Davies (University of Cambridge), of the 2006 production of a Cambodian adaptation of the opera (Pamina Devi: A Cambodian Magic Flute, Khmer Arts Ensemble, directed by Sophiline Cheam-Shapiro) and a 2006 South African production Impempe Yomlingo, an award-winning retelling of The Magic Flute with Mozart's music arranged for a percussion ensemble and a thirty-member singer-dancer chorus. Both productions illustrated how the process of globalization allowed for new postcolonial appropriations of this emblematic work of the European Enlightenment, even by members of groups that The Magic Flute presents as exotic and inferior.

The conference thus brought together scholarship with diverse preoccupations, from eighteenth-century aesthetics to contemporary children's literature. In spite of the divergent specializations, discussions following the presentations and during coffee breaks were intense and stimulating, and thus emphasized the vitality of a conference focused on the ‘around’ and the ‘after’ of a single artwork.