14 - Partial Derivatives: Sources, Types, and Tropes in The Magic Flute

Summary

For much of its history The Magic Flute has posed source problems. Some single out literary antecedents drawn from a variety of genres; others emphasize social and cultural influences. To see Mozart’s last opera instead as a synthetic, exploratory work questions whether these different readings are necessarily at odds with each other. As Goethe suggested, the work seems to offer different readings to different audiences. Gernot Gruber has distinguished “causal-historical” readings of the opera, which ground themselves in its cultural-political world, and “metahistorical” ones, which favor the abstract, the mythic, or the universally human. These categories may themselves complement rather than compete with each other.