On September 30, 1791, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart stood at the keyboard and directed the first performance of Die Zauberflote at Emanuel Schikaneder's Theater auf der Wieden, in a suburb south of Vienna. Mozart conducted. Schikaneder himself played Papageno. The house was full, and the opera was a success from the opening night, which was not what everyone connected with it had expected.
The libretto was Schikaneder's. It is a mess. It works. Tamino is sent by the Queen of the Night to rescue her daughter Pamina from Sarastro, and when he reaches Sarastro's temple he finds that the supposed villain is running an order of initiates who test candidates by ordeal, and that the Queen is the one to fear. Papageno, a bird-catcher who wants food, wine and a wife, is given the same trials, fails all of them, and is given Papagena anyway.
The music is the reason it survives. Mozart wrote for a popular theatre and for a company that was not an opera company, so Papageno's songs are folk-like and the Queen of the Night's two arias are the hardest coloratura in the repertory, while Sarastro's music sits low and calm for the bass. Mozart and Schikaneder were both Freemasons, and the trials, the ordeals by fire and water, the emphasis on the number three, and the signs and symbols all come from Masonic ritual that Mozart had joined in 1784.
He had other work in hand. La clemenza di Tito had been performed in Prague three weeks earlier, and he was writing the Requiem. He was 35 and ill. He took to his bed at the end of November and died on December 5, leaving the Requiem unfinished. The Magic Flute was still playing to full houses, and another year of it would have paid his debts.
The theatre closed in 1801 and the building was later replaced, but the opera never left the repertory. It was among the first Mozart operas performed in the United States, in an English version in 1833, and it is today among the most performed operas in the world. What began as a commercial venture in a suburban playhouse with a talking bird-catcher ended as the work most people mean when they say Mozart.