ABSTRACT
As shown in Chapter 2, the intensely didactic moments in Die Entführung aus dem Serail, exhorting the audience to accept Enlightenment principles such as compassion, fidelity, and magnanimity, to a large extent grew out of the aesthetics of German national theater debated in Vienna from the mid-eighteenth century on. The moralistic aesthetics were put into operatic practice with the foundation of Joseph II’s National Singspiel company in 1778; but Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte was conceived under radically different circumstances. After 1788, the court theater no longer produced German-language operas, and Mozart wrote his final Singspiel for Emanuel Schikaneder’s suburban company, less concerned with appeasing the ideologues of state-supported national theater than attracting paying audiences from diverse social backgrounds (the distinctions between the National Singspiel and the suburban companies are discussed in Chapter 4). And yet, Die Zauberflöte exhibits moralistic preoccupations that are at least as intense as those in Die Entführung.1 Leaving aside the suburban context for now, this chapter argues that Die Zauberflöte’s didacticism was heavily indebted to the operatic developments at the court theater during the 1780s; in their collaborative work Mozart and Schikaneder both incorporated didactic tropes associated with earlier Singspiele and avoided the ironic approaches to moral instruction typical for Italian-language works produced at the court theater in the previous decade.
