This chapter explores Leonard Bernstein’s work as pianist-conductor, including early influences that shaped Bernstein’s choice to conduct while playing, preferred repertoire (Mozart, Beethoven, Ravel and Gershwin), and reception by audience, and critics. Bernstein’s technique as conductor-pianist is analysed through audio and video recordings, as well as through the study of Bernstein’s annotated scores from the New York Philharmonic Archives. A brief history of conducting from the piano serves to contextualize this notable aspect of Bernstein’s career. Particular attention is given to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which was among Bernstein’s most frequently performed pieces while leading the orchestra from the piano. An analysis of three different recorded performances of Bernstein’s performance of the Rhapsody – two audio recordings and one televised broadcast – provide insight into significant moments (and challenges) for Bernstein as pianist-conductor, as well as key interpretive changes in his performance over time.

The period c.1780–c.1830, covered by this book, was a high point in the ‘fruitful age of musical translations’ (Beethoven). This trend was driven partly by the social and political circumstances, which made private and semi-private music-making particularly feasible and appealing, creating a demand for chamber music that was within the reach of the enthusiastic amateur. But the vogue for arrangements was also a function of the music publishing trade and its governance (or lack of it) around 1800. This chapter explores the vogue for opera in Vienna from the perspectives of composers, then through the lens of publishers’ catalogues, considering which types of opera and which composers were most liked, and how opera (in various ‘musical translations’) infiltrated into Viennese homes around 1800.

This chapter explores why, in an era so strongly associated with Beethoven and Schubert, Rossini’s music was such a hit in Vienna, looking at the contribution of opera in the home to this popularity. Opera arrangements spread Rossini’s music around a wide public even before public performances were staged. Hit numbers such as ‘Di tanti palpiti’ from Tancredi were performed over and over in Vienna, in various venues and with various combinations of instruments and voices. The ‘judges of German art’ decried his work in newspaper reviews; but this did little or nothing to dampen the market’s enthusiasm. Sales of Rossini’s operas rocketed, as publishing catalogues from the era demonstrate. The popularity of Rossini, fuelled via opera arrangements, is linked to those aspects of Rossini’s music that the critics decried, especially repetition, noise, genre blurring, and theatricality. The thirst for arrangements that promoted and exacerbated these aspects is linked, in turn, to the context of surveillance and censorship in which the contemporary Viennese found themselves, and related to Habsburg politics and the Metternich System.

This study takes a novel approach, privileging opera arrangements over original operatic compositions, and the perspectives of amateur performers over those of composers. Several studies of opera arrangements from the era in question have already been published, which focus on particular composers or particular arrangement forms; and the emphasis lies on arrangements’ function as reception documents. This study differs in considering arrangements’ multiple functions, and ‘end users.

This essay discusses immediate, or “erotic,” aesthetic agency, the first of several stages of the figure of the aesthete in Either/Or. Erotic aesthetic agency consists in an almost naïve, all but nonpurposive pursuit of occasions to exercise the power to overwhelm the wills of others in one’s sheer desire of them, to incorporate them in one’s own terms by operation of simple impulse. The effect of this agency on others is to subject them to desire as such, that is, to desire as a force that binds them to the Don. But the ultimate aim of the agency is its existence: that it be. The conceptual structure of Kierkegaard’s understanding of this starting point in the aesthetic view of the world, as it is presented by a self-professed fictional aesthete, is explored with reference to the figure that organizes much of the portrayal of the erotic aesthete, Don Juan, as he appears in Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera Don Giovanni. Special attention is paid both to details of the opera as Kierkegaard would have experienced it and to the slippage between a reflective aesthete, A, imagining an unreflective aesthete, the Don, as an ideal.

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!

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.

Complaints about the libretto have long shadowed The Magic Flute. The spoken dialogue especially has been disparaged, first regarding plot and, recently, gender and race. This chapter argues that to cut the dialogue is to lose a wealth of detail with respect to character and plot that needs to be understood as essential to the dramatic action. It offers close readings starting at the level of words or phrases that cannot be lost without consequence. Issues examined in speech include class and institutional hypocrisy (Tamino and Papageno); gender (the Queen of the Night); race (Monostatos); and female ambition (Sarastro). Each character conveys in speech a desire to be seen beyond stereotype, demonstrated here alongside relevant social context in Mozart’s time and ours. With nuanced treatment of controversial issues, the chapter debunks a fundamentally flawed justification for cuts – that our society is morally superior to the one that produced this work.

Until late in the twentieth century, formal analysis of Mozart’s operatic ensembles (chiefly those of the Da Ponte operas) was heavily skewed towards the invocation of instrumental models, and pre-eminently sonata form. Additionally, the pursuit of “absolute correspondence between the unfolding of music, text and stage-action” (Abbate and Parker) came to seem increasingly suspect. The Magic Flute is a Singspiel, rather than an opera buffa, and its ensembles are complicated by the existence of “ensemble characters” (the Three Ladies and Three Boys) who generally function collectively rather than individually. This chapter offers analyses of the Act 1 and 2 quintets and the Three Boys’ Act 2 terzetto, seeking to destabilize readings that appeal to models such as sonata rondo and reading tonal structures closely against libretto structure. Evidence from Mozart’s autograph informs the concluding discussion of vocal scoring in the Act 2 choruses and the final moments of the work.

“Staging The Magic Flute” examines the production history of Mozart’s opera over more than two centuries, from its 1791 premiere to 2019. It focuses especially on productions of The Magic Flute since 1970 and the critical reactions they have provoked, and asks if there can ever be a definitive staging of this iconic work. Productions discussed in detail range from Barrie Kosky’s radical “silent movie” version for the Komische Oper Berlin to August Everding and David McVicar’s long-running fairytale-Enlightenment stagings for (respectively) the Bavarian State Opera and The Royal Opera. Among the many other directors and designers discussed are Marc Chagall, Ingmar Bergman, David Hockney, Peter Sellars, Pierre Audi, Julie Taymor, Peter Stein, and Simon McBurney.

This chapter recounts the history, context, and significance of Ingmar Bergman’s 1975 film adaptation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Whereas films from theatrical or operatic sources tend to distance themselves from stage artifice, Bergman’s production emphasizes and revels in it. In doing so, it also comments on and, in some ways, turns from the work for which he is best known, celebrated and, sometimes, excoriated. The Enlightenment optimism of Mozart’s text provides a sharp contrast to Bergman’s brand of anxious, often agonized high modernism. It also provides a foil, both heartening and convincing, to the direness so often evident in 1970s cinema, and in the life and discourse surrounding it.

An exploration of Collins’s musical likes and dislikes. He particularly disliked ’German’ music of the nineteenth century, with particular scorn for Schumann and Beethoven, although he admired Mozart

This chapter explores how Czech translations and productions of Die Zauberflöte intertwined with the development of Czech national culture between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries. The history of the Czech Zauberflöte adaptations illustrates the gradual transformation of the Czech national movement from a branch of Bohemian regional patriotism into a confident and even aggressive nationalistic movement with strong anti-German tendencies. Die Zauberflöte was the first Mozart opera to be translated into Czech in 1794. In the early nineteenth century, Czech nationalists called for a new translation that would express their anti-German sentiments. Similar sentiments also dominated Czech criticism of Die Zauberflöte in the 1860s, according to which Mozart’s Singspiel was inferior to his Italian operas. In the 1880s, the Czech National Theater managed to incorporate Die Zauberflöte into the canon of national operas, but only by suppressing Schikaneder’s original plot and rearranging Mozart’s music.

This chapter shows how ethnic concepts became prominent in Bohemian debates about Mozart in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter first explores the writings of Mozart’s first biographer Franz Xaver Niemetschek to show that around 1800 regional identity in Prague was dominated by the ambiguous concept of Bohemian patriotism. With the rise of Czech and German ethnic nationalism in the ensuing decades, Prague’s critics and musicologists mined Mozart’s operas, as well as works by his eighteenth-century contemporaries and predecessors, such as Stamitz and Gluck, for inherent qualities associated with Czech and German-Bohemian cultures, especially folk music. In the 1930s, Czech and German-Bohemian musicologists used racial criteria to prove that Gluck’s and Mozart’s music was inherently Czech or German (or Sudeten German, as many Czechoslovak Germans identified themselves by then). These ethnocentric preoccupations were further emphasized by Czech Marxist musicologists in the post–World War II period.

This chapter explores the relationship between political developments in Bohemia from the 1790s to the 1880s and the concept of fidelity to “authentic” texts and music (Werktreue) in Mozart’s operas. The idea of Werktreue appeared in Prague in the 1790s in response to Bohemian patriotism and negative attitudes to the central government in Vienna. In the 1820s, Czech nationalists embraced similar attitudes in approaching Don Giovanni, and both the first Czech production of 1825 and the first production of the work at the Czech National Theater (1884) showcased the opera with musical numbers that were cut in contemporaneous German productions. German-Bohemians appropriated Werktreue as well but understood “authentic” performances of Don Giovanni as a link to the ideals of a pan-German national culture. By the time of the 1887 Don Giovanni centennial celebrations, however, some German-Bohemian critics considered Werktreue in Mozart’s operas antithetical to true German art under the influence of Wagnerian ideas.

This chapter focuses on the history of three Mozart monuments in Prague: a Mozart foundation in Prague’s university library established in 1837 to compete with the plans for a Mozart monument in Salzburg; a German Mozart monument that was to be built in the city center in 1914; and Bertramka, a suburban estate where Mozart supposedly lived during his Bohemian visits and where he purportedly finished Don Giovanni. All three commemorative sites were embroiled in various Czech–German national conflicts. The chapter focuses on the process through which Bertramka transformed into a national shrine and the patriotic myths that contributed to this transformation. Whereas Czech commentators viewed Bertramka as a monument to Mozart’s ties to the Czechs, German Bohemians considered it a symbolic site of German culture. Patriotic and nationalist concerns eventually imbued the myths about Mozart and Bertramka with an aura of truth.