Just as singing was the foundation of Amy Beach’s musical world, songs formed the backbone for her composing. It was through songwriting that she won her initial fame as a composer, and for which she was best remembered for decades after her death. She composed songs prolifically throughout her career, producing 121 art songs. They predominate her total compositional output, often serving as a proving ground for larger works. They demonstrate her intimacy with the texts she chose to set, mastery of the form, and awareness of trends in current European musical styles. Insightful interpretation of poetic material and a keen awareness of languages’ natural inflections led to creation of melodies that flow as easily as the spoken word. This characteristic sets her songs apart from those of her peers and makes her songs accessible to both amateur and professional musicians. Recent rediscovery of Beach’s songs is due in large part to copyright expirations, making the majority of her songs readily available on the internet.

From the ambitious Mass in E-flat, op. 5 (1890) through Pax nobiscum (1944), choral music played an ongoing role in Amy Beach’s creative life. The works are stylistically varied, ranging from typical Victorian harmonies and textures in the early works, through sacred anthems and services inspired by Anglican choral traditions during her middle period, and finally to spare, harmonically experimental late works. Her most important secular choral works were written during the years of her marriage, when she was also composing her major instrumental works. After the death of her husband in 1910, she turned increasingly to religion for solace and inspiration, finding a spiritual home in the Episcopal Church. Her association with St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York and its music director, David McKay Williams, proved crucial in shaping the music of her later years. The Canticle of the Sun, op. 123 (1924) was exemplary of the sacred choral works that were her most performed compositions in later years.

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!

Amy Beach’s “dramatic works” encompass a select few compositions over the course of her career, united by shared themes and collaboration with other female artists: two dramatic unstaged arias for solo voice and orchestra, Eilende Wolken, Segler der Lüfte (1892) and Jephthah’s Daughter (1903); and her only opera, Cabildo (1932). These dramatic works are few and far between in her oeuvre, but they represent landmarks in her lifelong creative processes. Eilende Wolken, Beach’s first commissioned work, is one of the first examples of her use of folk song in her compositions. Jephthah’s Daughter is a challenging and mature work, straddling her years focused primarily on composition and the revival of her performing career. Cabildo is filled with borrowed folk song and her own melodies with a romantic plot set during a major American historical event, representing the qualities of American opera she suggested for years.

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.

Many factors have worked against an understanding of the genesis of Die Zauberflöte. Few of the composer’s letters mention it. The work has no single dramatic or operatic model. Only a couple of sketches and drafts survive, and the autograph score is relatively free of significant compositional changes. Mozart did not live to see a revised production. The gaps have traditionally been filled with speculations and false histories: the claim that Karl Ludwig Giesecke was a co-author (he wasn’t); an assertion that the text in the libretto and score was not original (it is); a hypothesis of the creators’ change of plans mid-stream, leading to discontinuities between Acts 1 and 2 (this does not hold up); and endless theories of planned symbolism and allegory (mostly wild beyond credibility). But there is evidence of the opera’s creation in the libretto and its construction; in the autograph score; in surviving material from early performances; and in stage directions and other scenic clues. The picture that emerges suggests an opera that was much less stable than has been assumed, and of a work that underwent revision just like most stage works of the late eighteenth century.

This chapter offers an account of the circumstances surrounding the creation of The Magic Flute and its earliest performances. Through an examination of the latest research and documentary evidence, alongside established accounts and early iconography, this essay considers how audiences may have experienced the opera in 1791. “The Magic Flute in 1791” thus contextualizes the genesis and earliest stagings of the work not as Mozart’s final opera, but rather as the product of a particular historical moment.

This chapter provides an overview of the history, habits, and musico-dramatic conventions of German comic opera in German courtly theaters, the Burgtheater and Kärtnertortheater, and the three suburban theaters: the Theater in der Leopoldstadt, Theater auf der Wieden, and the Theater in der Josephstadt. Arguing for a transnational development of German opera, it delves deeply into paradigmatic examples of key moments in courtly and suburban theatrical life: Ignaz Umlauf’s Die Bergknappen (1778) and its relationship to resource extraction and mining in late eighteenth-century Vienna; Wranitzky’s Oberon (1789) and elements of magic opera in dialogue and in song; and finally, comic antics in Wenzel Müller’s Kaspar der Fagottist (1791).