ABSTRACT
A conscious and cultivated orientation on the part of many authors, musicians, and painters vis-a-vis specific historical periods was a pervasive characteristic feature of fin de siecle Austrian culture. Although all operas of Austria’s past played a key role in the process of legitimation through culture, by the early twentieth century Austria had adopted The Magic Flute as one of the most celebrated cultural signs of its Enlightenment past. In a comparison of the role of this canonical cipher of the Joseph II period in Hofmannsthal’s libretto The Woman without a Shadow of 1915 with that in Schnitzler’s prose text Rhapsody: A Dream Novel of 1925–1926, the authors’ diametrically opposed literary reactions to the contemporary ideology of historicism emerge with poignant clarity. When The Woman without a Shadow was first performed in Vienna in 1919, it established in the Austrian public’s mind a work obviously and overtly based on The Magic Flute that clearly celebrated Enlightenment ideals.
