137
Opera-goers in London watch from a
box in a 1796 painting by an unknown
artist. Opera became fashionable in
the early 18th century, with new operas
commissioned for each season.Zauberoper (“magic opera”), which
mingled comedy with supernatural
elements and impressive spectacle.
Keen to repeat the success of
Wranitzky’s work, Schikaneder
himself wrote the libretto for the
new opera, although it is likely that
Mozart collaborated as well. The
two men took a fairy tale by August
Jacob Liebeskind, Lulu, oder die
Zauberflöte (Lulu, or The Magic
Flute), as their starting point but
transformed it almost beyond
recognition. Among other things,
they added Masonic elements
(Wranitzky, Schikaneder, and
Mozart were Freemasons), such
as in the initiatory ordeals that
the protagonists endure.The Magic Flute
Mozart died in 1791, just two
months after The Magic Flute
premiered. It was not only his last
major completed work but also one
of his most sublime. In all Mozart’s
operas, he showed an unsurpassed
gift for creating the right music to
fit each character, situation, or
emotion. In The Magic Flute, this
ranges from the deep solemnity of
the priest Sarastro’s songs and two
powerful arias of the Queen of theNight to the touching comedy of
the duet, “Pa-pa-pa-Papagena,”
in which Papageno and his mate
Papagena imagine a blissful future
together. Only such a perfect
command of musical expression
enabled Mozart to hold together
convincingly the often unsettling
ambivalences and reversals of the
opera, such as the point when the
Queen of the Night unexpectedly
turns from grieving mother to spite-
filled ally of her daughter’s worst
enemy, Monostatos.
The opera’s premiere on
September 30, 1791, started badly
but ended well. During the first act,
the audience was muted in its
response. Perhaps, despite the
recent success of Oberon, King of
the Elves, they were baffled by the
Zauberoper’s strangely magical
qualities. In the second act,
however, the audience came
alive and at the end called Mozart
onto the stage to applaud him.
The Magic Flute has remained
perennially popular ever since.CL ASSICAL 1750 –1820
The Magic Flute’s influence on
the development of singspiel and
German Romantic opera was
fundamental. It carried singspiel
into the 19th century, when the
genre developed in two directions.
One strand led to Beethoven’s
opera Fidelio (1805), and—more
formatively—to further “magic
operas,” such as E.T.A. Hoffmann’s
Undine (1816) and Carl Maria von
Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821) and
Oberon (1826). These were the
precursors of full-blown German
Romantic opera, best exemplified
in the works of Richard Wagner.
The other strand of singspiel stayed
true to its lighter-hearted origins,
leading to the Viennese operettas
of Johann Strauss the younger
(Die Fledermaus) and Franz Lehár
(The Merry Widow). ■Salieri listened and watched
with total attentiveness ...
there wasn’t a number that
didn’t call forth from him
a “bravo” or a “bello.”
Wolfgang Amadeus
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