Mozart's last opera mixed fairy tale, freemasonry, and spoken lines
Die Zauberflöte, K. 620, is Mozart's two-act Singspiel to Emanuel Schikaneder's German libretto—sung numbers plus spoken dialogue. It opened on 30 September 1791 at the Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna, about two months before Mozart died, and was an immediate hit that still anchors the repertory.
Prince Tamino, urged by the Queen of the Night to free Pamina from Sarastro, instead absorbs Sarastro's ideals and endures initiation trials with her; bird-catcher Papageno fails the tests yet wins Papagena anyway. The piece crowned Mozart's work with Schikaneder's theatrical troupe, resident at the Wiedn theater since 1789. Tenor Benedikt Schack created Tamino; the 1790 fairy-opera Der Stein der Weisen, to which Mozart contributed passages including a duet, used much of the same company in similar roles and served as a precursor.
Scholars trace the libretto to sources from Chrétien de Troyes's Yvain and Jean Terrasson's Life of Sethos to Ignaz von Born's Egyptian mysteries essay, Viennese Hanswurst comedy for Papageno, and Freemasonry's emphasis on threes—ladies, boys, temples—heard again in the overture's brass chords. Charles Rosen praised the score's unmatched eighteenth-century orchestral color, each effect a single dramatic stroke: whistle, coloratura, bells, trombones. Papageno's steel stromento d'acciaio is lost; modern pits usually substitute a keyed glockenspiel or celesta.
Two Salieri echoes surface: the Papageno–Papagena duet's playful pseudo-Italian chatter resembles a cavatina from Prima la musica e poi le parole, and Papageno's whistle borrows a motif from Salieri's B-flat clavicembalo concerto. The overture, written last after the rest of the opera, feints a false ending before plunging the fugue into E-flat minor and home again—ceremony and comedy braided straight to the final curtain.
Source: The Magic Flute
