The German soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient had a profound influence on aesthetic ideals regarding vocal delivery and emergent genres for German commentators from Ludwig Tieck to Rellstab and Wagner. With a focus on contemporary biographical sources and reception, this chapter contextualises her reception within the German states as irreducibly hybrid, as a voice that dissolved aesthetic boundaries, most clearly between speech and song. The shifting role of bel canto vis-à-vis contemporary sopranos (Henrietta Sontag / Maria Malibran), and the emergence of new genres characterise her complex reception, all of which is set against Wagner’s own claims for her artistry, following her creation of the roles Adriano (Rienzi), Senta (Holländer), and Venus (Tannhäuser).

In this chapter, I consider how we might address the legacies of race and racism in The Magic Flute and its performance history, and what opportunities there might be to re-envision the Singspiel, by looking at parallels with Shakespeare repertory and #ShakeRace studies. Scholars working at the intersections of premodern critical race theory, postcolonial studies, Shakespeare studies, and performance studies have for decades considered how what Kim Hall calls “race thinking” permeates Shakespeare’s texts, contexts, and audiences, as well as productions and interpretations in our own time. What kind of freedom or flexibility might we have to adapt, translate, appropriate, and “unsettle” The Magic Flute in scholarship, performance, and pedagogy, by taking our cue from experimental approaches to Shakespeare?

In the nineteenth century, E. T. A. Hoffmann invoked the Magic Flute as an example of restraint in orchestration: despite the opera’s trials and tribulations, the music never descends into bombast. Other critics were underwhelmed by the orchestration, which seems devoid of the instrumental effects promised by the title. This essay argues that the magic of Mozart’s orchestration lies in the ways in which it constructs different relationships with the stage action. Whether it’s the acoustic portraits of characters such as the Three Spirits, the pragmatics (and illusions) of on-stage musical performance, or the musical control of performing bodies by seemingly self-playing instruments, Mozart’s orchestration thematizes relationships between sounds and their sources. This essay puts the instruments of the pit in dialogue with the instruments on stage and, in so doing, illuminates the subtle ways in which Mozart uses the orchestra, as much as his characters, to tell his last story.

For much of its history The Magic Flute has posed source problems. Some single out literary antecedents drawn from a variety of genres; others emphasize social and cultural influences. To see Mozart’s last opera instead as a synthetic, exploratory work questions whether these different readings are necessarily at odds with each other. As Goethe suggested, the work seems to offer different readings to different audiences. Gernot Gruber has distinguished “causal-historical” readings of the opera, which ground themselves in its cultural-political world, and “metahistorical” ones, which favor the abstract, the mythic, or the universally human. These categories may themselves complement rather than compete with each other.

The manner in which Die Zauberflöte established itself as a cultural icon in late-eighteenth-century German society is remarkable. It permeated daily life in countless ways: fashion, pet naming, board games, risqué party entertainments, mechanical toys, children’s playlets, and whistling birds. While this represents the escapism of the opera’s fairy-tale plot, darker strands are woven into the fabric of its early reception. It swept across Europe during a period of bloody revolutionary war, and all sides made use of it in their political propaganda. Papageno was ensconced at the heart of the Prussian military establishment when one of his tunes was added to the carillon of the Potsdam Garnisonkirche. At the same time, his music, under the banner of freedom, entered the republican song repertoire. After Napoleon’s cataclysmic defeat near Leipzig in 1814, a satirist was quick to wish him a derisory farewell as he sailed back across the Rhine. What better choice than the language of the opera: auf wiedersehen!

In the years since its premiere, The Magic Flute has been written about in a variety of contexts, by a multitude of authors, and from a dizzying range of perspectives. While it would be impossible for any single volume to adequately capture the range and complexity of two centuries’ worth of research, commentary, and performance, this Cambridge Companion to “The Magic Flute” provides twenty-one essays on diverse topics, all newly written expressly for this collection. One important predecessor to this volume is Peter Branscombe’s 1991 Cambridge Opera Handbook, W. A. Mozart: “Die Zauberflöte.” Since that time, however, there have been significant documentary discoveries and developments. A wealth of recent scholarship – ranging from books on Mozart and his contemporaries to studies of opera as a genre to explorations of Mozart’s contemporary Viennese and German contexts – has broadened the contexts in which we understand this opera. This Companion provides up-to-date commentary and interpretation in a single volume, with special emphasis on four key areas.