The transformation of Beach’s reputation from an almost-forgotten relic of a bygone era to one of the most highly regarded American Romantic composers provides a case study in reception history. Her “renaissance” resulted from determined advocacy on two fronts: scholarly research and musical performance. In scholarship, the University of New Hampshire and the Library of Congress have assembled formidable archival collections, while Adrienne Fried Block and a bevy of dissertation writers have worked to shed light on Beach’s life and works through publications and conferences. In the performance realm, pianists Virginia Eskin, Mary Louise Boehm, and Joanne Polk have worked tirelessly to introduce her music to the public in concerts and recordings. Several recent documentary films confirm her appeal as a subject and her status in American cultural history.

Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (1867–1944) was a musical prodigy whose professional career vacillated between piano performance and composition. Her professional debut was delayed until age sixteen because of parental misgivings, and then her performance career was curtailed at age eighteen when she married a prominent physician, Dr. H. H. A. Beach. His insistence that she devote her energies to composition rather than performance, along with his desire that she remain self-taught, inspired her to develop a unique late-Romantic compositional style. With the support of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its musicians, she produced a Mass with orchestra, a symphony, a concerto, and numerous chamber works. Her trailblazing accomplishments included many firsts for American women composers. After the death of her husband and mother in 1910 and 1911, she reinvented herself as a virtuoso performer while still composing. Her compositional output is widely varied in genre, instrumentation, and musical style.

In this chapter, I consider how we might address the legacies of race and racism in The Magic Flute and its performance history, and what opportunities there might be to re-envision the Singspiel, by looking at parallels with Shakespeare repertory and #ShakeRace studies. Scholars working at the intersections of premodern critical race theory, postcolonial studies, Shakespeare studies, and performance studies have for decades considered how what Kim Hall calls “race thinking” permeates Shakespeare’s texts, contexts, and audiences, as well as productions and interpretations in our own time. What kind of freedom or flexibility might we have to adapt, translate, appropriate, and “unsettle” The Magic Flute in scholarship, performance, and pedagogy, by taking our cue from experimental approaches to Shakespeare?

Just as singing was the foundation of Amy Beach’s musical world, songs formed the backbone for her composing. It was through songwriting that she won her initial fame as a composer, and for which she was best remembered for decades after her death. She composed songs prolifically throughout her career, producing 121 art songs. They predominate her total compositional output, often serving as a proving ground for larger works. They demonstrate her intimacy with the texts she chose to set, mastery of the form, and awareness of trends in current European musical styles. Insightful interpretation of poetic material and a keen awareness of languages’ natural inflections led to creation of melodies that flow as easily as the spoken word. This characteristic sets her songs apart from those of her peers and makes her songs accessible to both amateur and professional musicians. Recent rediscovery of Beach’s songs is due in large part to copyright expirations, making the majority of her songs readily available on the internet.

From the ambitious Mass in E-flat, op. 5 (1890) through Pax nobiscum (1944), choral music played an ongoing role in Amy Beach’s creative life. The works are stylistically varied, ranging from typical Victorian harmonies and textures in the early works, through sacred anthems and services inspired by Anglican choral traditions during her middle period, and finally to spare, harmonically experimental late works. Her most important secular choral works were written during the years of her marriage, when she was also composing her major instrumental works. After the death of her husband in 1910, she turned increasingly to religion for solace and inspiration, finding a spiritual home in the Episcopal Church. Her association with St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York and its music director, David McKay Williams, proved crucial in shaping the music of her later years. The Canticle of the Sun, op. 123 (1924) was exemplary of the sacred choral works that were her most performed compositions in later years.

In the nineteenth century, E. T. A. Hoffmann invoked the Magic Flute as an example of restraint in orchestration: despite the opera’s trials and tribulations, the music never descends into bombast. Other critics were underwhelmed by the orchestration, which seems devoid of the instrumental effects promised by the title. This essay argues that the magic of Mozart’s orchestration lies in the ways in which it constructs different relationships with the stage action. Whether it’s the acoustic portraits of characters such as the Three Spirits, the pragmatics (and illusions) of on-stage musical performance, or the musical control of performing bodies by seemingly self-playing instruments, Mozart’s orchestration thematizes relationships between sounds and their sources. This essay puts the instruments of the pit in dialogue with the instruments on stage and, in so doing, illuminates the subtle ways in which Mozart uses the orchestra, as much as his characters, to tell his last story.

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.

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!