The libretto for Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) was created by Emmanuel Schikaneder (1751-1812). Schikaneder was an actor of great breadth and talent who made his reputation by playing the classic roles of Shakespeare and Schiller in a touring company originating in his native Regensburg and that spent some time in Salzburg, Mozart’s home town, in 1780. Although he was best known for his Hamlet, he was evidently an actor of fine comic talent, and by the time he hit Vienna he was well known for his clown characters. Invited by Joseph II to establish a singspiel tradition in Vienna, he chose as his first production Mozart’s Die entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio). He eventually re-located to Vienna and managed the Theater auf der Wieden (or Freihaustheater) with his wife. Schikaneder was a canny administrator who was capable of coming up with clever schemes to keep his company afloat in desperate times. The Theater auf der Wieden attracted a large cross section of people, aristocrats as well as common folk who enjoyed the great variety that Schikaneder’s company had to offer.
Evidently Schikaneder’s request for an opera from Mozart stemmed from one of the theatre’s financial crises. He was looking for a work that would attract as large an audience as possible, that would be of high artistic merit but popular at the same time. He evidently ordered it in the form of a singspiel, a typically German form of opera that used spoken dialogue with sung numbers. This was a style of musical entertainment popular in the non-aristocratic theatres in German speaking countries that can be traced back to the first performance of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera in German translation in the early 18th century. Since that time the singspiel had become quite popular as a form, and many of the libretti for these pieces came from the more fantastic strains of German literature. Schikaneder derived the libretto for The Magic Flute from various sources but most significantly from a story called Lulu, oder der Zauberflöte from a collection of pseudo-oriental fairy tales published in 1786 under the title Dschinnistan. But the most significant source, at least underneath the surface, seems to be the ritual and symbolism of the fraternal order of freemasons, a group of which both Schikaneder and Mozart were associated.
It should be noted that Schikaneder was not allowed to become a Freemason in his native Regensburg because his character did not fit their moral code of ethics (he was evidently something of a womanizer). It is rumored that he was a member of the lodge in Vienna that Mozart belonged to, but there is no evidence to support this claim.
That Zauberflöte is a barely veiled Masonic allegory cannot be doubted. It acts, in fact, as a kind of introduction to the secret society. Its story celebrates the main themes of masonry: good vs. evil, enlightenment vs. ignorance, and the virtues of knowledge, justice, wisdom and truth. The evocation of the four elements (earth, air, water and fire), the injunction of silence in the Masonic ritual, the figures of the bird, the serpent and the padlock as well as the ‘rule of three’ all play important roles in the plot or in the musical fabric of the opera (three ‘Ladies’, three ‘Boys’, three loud chords at the beginning of the overture signifying the three ‘knocks’ of the initiates at the temple, three temples, the three flats of E-flat Major which is the primary tonality of the work, etc.) All of these symbols and characteristics come from Egyptian lore and the various urtexts of Masonry; hence the opera’s libretto is set in Egypt, although many productions eschew that specification.