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.

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.

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.