This chapter looks at critical writings on The Magic Flute, focusing on the different periods in which it first came to prominence in Germanic, French, and Anglophone countries, as well as at contributions made by Mozart’s major nineteenth-century biographers (Ignaz Arnold, Georg von Nissen, Alexandre Oulibicheff, Edward Holmes, Otto Jahn, Ludwig Nohl).  It also studies a representative sample of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary works and visual media – by Goethe, Heribert Rau, Heinrich Smidt, Lotte Reiniger, G. Lowes Dickinson, Karl Hartl – that reference or are inspired by the opera.  Common themes in all areas of reception include the harsh treatment of Schikaneder, and a Mozartian narrative combining a creative peak with fatal physical decline.

A complex dynamic of continuity and change for Haydn and Mozart individually and together characterizes 120 years of reception. Mozart gained a reputational upper hand over Haydn in the first decade of the nineteenth century, remaining a step ahead thereafter (at least in terms of volume of scholarship); the Haydn–Mozart–Beethoven progression narrative began as one among several competing representations of the Viennese triumvirate, assumed hermeneutic prominence mid-century, and then subsided; popularly orientated biographies, biographical sketches, and fiction flourished from the early 1800s onwards, bearing especially ripe fruit in the second half of the nineteenth century; big scholarly strides were made for Haydn from the late 1860s, and Mozart in isolated works from the second quarter of the century, for three decades from the mid-1850s onwards and then from 1906; major anniversaries were celebrated to differing extents (Haydn) and in similar and different ways (Mozart), growing out of existing reception-related activities in each case rather than jolting reception to a new level; and both composers came alive for readers, listeners, performers, music lovers, and scholars alike through the publication of letters, other primary-source materials, and ‘new’ works inter alia in complete editions.

As the long nineteenth century drew to a close amidst musical and social upheaval, three major anniversaries were celebrated for Haydn and Mozart – two centenaries of death and a sesquicentenary of birth in 1891, 1909, and 1906, respectively – against the backdrop of an evolving musicological climate beneficial to both. For example, distrust in the idea of musical progress, aligned with continued and increasing skepticism about social and political progress more generally in the decades either side of 1900,1 worked to their advantage as composers of century-old works and to Haydn’s specifically as the first of the Viennese triumvirate. For Donald Tovey in 1902, artistic and scientific manifestations of the phenomenon needed to be distinguished.

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the juggernaut of Mozart reception is witnessed in full flow – in momentous biographies, lavish anniversary celebrations, delightful fiction, and laudatory criticism. Musicians and writers had become increasingly invested in Mozart; any questioning of his genius, or collision between legends and realities in the life story, could elicit a torrent of argument and counter-argument.1 His quasi-sacred status is captured in a humorous exchange from The Musical World (1841). Deemed a heretic for questioning Mozart’s instrumentation in the Don Giovanni overture, Henry Tilbury confessed that ‘there is no such wretch living (at least I hope not) that would attempt to tarnish the bright and glorious halo of Mozart’s name’; he was duly admitted – tongue firmly in cheek – by the ‘Lord High Archbishop of the “Musical World” … into the bosom of the “Mother Church” again’.2

Haydn and Mozart’s individual and collective critical reputations in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century were affected above all by the contents and orientations of a diverse range of writings and by Beethoven’s immense musical presence. With the immediacy of Haydn’s death receding and Mozart long gone, biographical work was able to build on foundations laid by distinguished writers such as Schlichtegroll, Niemetschek, Griesinger, and Dies in order both to feed an appetite for information about their lives and music and to demonstrate their continued relevance in a new era. In the process, similar and different perceptions of the two composers emerged, with biographical narratives stimulating explicitly fictional endeavours – where Haydn and Mozart were most readily able ‘to have, experience, exhibit, prove, live and perform … [their] selfhood’ in line with a key tenet of romanticism1 – as well as ostensibly factual endeavours.

Among critics in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Johann Friedrich Reichardt and E. T. A. Hoffmann lay especially strong claims to promoting a Viennese triumvirate of composers. In one of a series of letters from a trip to Vienna in 1808, subsequently published in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (AmZ) in 1810, Reichardt described a sequence of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven string quartets played by violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh’s ensemble.

Basic information about Haydn and Mozart’s relationship was readily available to interested parties in the long nineteenth century. In his memoirs (1826), the singer and creator of Don Basilio and Don Curzio at the premiere of Le nozze di Figaro, Michael Kelly, reported them playing string quartets together in 1784 – with Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf and Jan Vaňhal on second violin and cello – for a small gathering that included composer Giovanni Paisiello and poet and librettist Giovanni Battista Casti as well as Kelly himself. After the ‘musical feast’, moreover, the atmosphere was most convivial: ‘we sat down to an excellent supper, and became joyous and lively in the extreme’.1 Mozart documented a rendition of his newly completed set of string quartets with Haydn when dedicating them to his compositional elder and ‘very dear friend’ in Viennese publisher Artaria’s first edition of September 1785.2 And Haydn reciprocated Mozart’s admiration in famously stating to Mozart’s father Leopold, who was present at a read-through of the last three quartets of the set on 12 February 1785: ‘Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name. He has taste and, more than that, the greatest compositional knowledge.’

Following a productive period of critical reception for Haydn and Mozart in the mid-nineteenth century, later decades would bring challenges wrought by ever-increasing temporal distance between their own lives, works and values, and the priorities and predilections of the present. Mozart’s letters might not initially attract the same attention from the public at large as Mendelssohn’s, we are told, as they are ‘so far removed from contemporary history’.1 And the distasteful late-eighteenth-century world of artistic servitude and concomitant restriction and limitation – as encapsulated by Haydn at Eszterháza for critics 100 years later – seemed a long time ago and had been much improved by the ‘sturdy independence of a Beethoven, who could stand unabashed in the presence of royalty … the intellect of a Schumann, whose written word is appreciated no less than his musical creations … [and by] a Mendelssohn, whose broad culture is apparent in letters and in painting as well as in his chosen art’.