Music publishing historian William Arms Fisher asserted in 1933 that “The great music publishers were primarily great music-lovers.” Composer Amy Beach was fortunate to work with a dozen of these music-loving publishers during her career; among them were the leaders of several of America’s greatest houses, including Arthur P. Schmidt Company (Boston), G. Schirmer, Inc. (New York), Theodore Presser Company (Philadelphia), and Oliver Ditson Company (Boston). She knew many of her publishers personally, and their partnerships were rewarding and mutually beneficial. Beach’s compositions gained a wide public and provided a good income, and her publishers benefitted not only from estimable musical additions to their catalogues, but also by the fact that she was a woman and-equally important in the World War I era-an American. “Amy Beach and Her Publishers” examines Beach’s relationships with her publishers, as well as their commitment to publishing her music while also keeping an eye on customers’ wants and changing economic conditions.

Amy Beach’s career paralleled the rise of women’s clubs across America; the widespread amateur and professional musical organizations were important to her success. Gendered musical communities not only hosted Beach as both pianist and composer but provided commissions and audiences to purchase and perform her music, such as the thirty pieces she created for the women’s choruses associated with clubs. Beach and her compositions figured heavily in women’s organizations’ nationalistic agendas and were highlighted in their educational materials. Beach was active in the National Federation of Music Clubs, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the National League of American Pen Women, and numerous other groups; her association with the NLAPW led to two White House appearances. These organizations provided her with supportive networks of like-minded women and deep friendships. In turn, Beach’s stature validated clubs’ efforts to promote America’s music and to make women central to its musical life.

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.

This chapter draws on conceptions of gender in Mozart’s time and ours to explore the opera’s representation of women. This aspect of The Magic Flute, including the misogynistic statements of the priests, is now widely regarded as problematic. The opera sets the rule of Sarastro and his brotherhood against the Queen and her entourage, and the focus on this conflict between the sexes has to some degree obscured the opera’s focus on the construction of gender in the characterization of Pamina and the Queen. Gender is performed on stage within an established context and frame of reference. Pamina is a sentimental heroine whose idealized image, abduction, and abandonment prove her moral virtue; the Queen is a dark and vengeful mother who refuses to accept her restricted position. This focus allows us to see how both mother and daughter complicate patriarchal assumptions by raising important questions about gender and power.

While the finales of The Magic Flute owe much to the standard model that Mozart drew upon in the finales of his Da Ponte operas, they also show features not typically seen in opera buffa finales. Three of these features can be clearly seen in the finales of Schikaneder’s earlier Singspiele at the Theater auf der Wieden. They are: the use of feierlich music (often in march style) for ceremonial, quasi-religious or magical scenes; greater attention to sets and set changes in Schikaneder’s lavish productions; and a looser, more episodic approach to the structure of a finale, with sharp changes in musical style that heighten the sense of separation from one section to the next. Though they resemble the finales of Schikaneder’s other Singspiele, Mozart’s Magic Flute finales are more effective, with superior musical invention and more sharply characterized dramatic moments.

Until late in the twentieth century, formal analysis of Mozart’s operatic ensembles (chiefly those of the Da Ponte operas) was heavily skewed towards the invocation of instrumental models, and pre-eminently sonata form. Additionally, the pursuit of “absolute correspondence between the unfolding of music, text and stage-action” (Abbate and Parker) came to seem increasingly suspect. The Magic Flute is a Singspiel, rather than an opera buffa, and its ensembles are complicated by the existence of “ensemble characters” (the Three Ladies and Three Boys) who generally function collectively rather than individually. This chapter offers analyses of the Act 1 and 2 quintets and the Three Boys’ Act 2 terzetto, seeking to destabilize readings that appeal to models such as sonata rondo and reading tonal structures closely against libretto structure. Evidence from Mozart’s autograph informs the concluding discussion of vocal scoring in the Act 2 choruses and the final moments of the work.

The MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire figured prominently in Amy Beach’s life. Her friendship with the artist colony’s founder, Marian MacDowell, ensured Beach an open invitation; she held eighteen residencies between 1921 and 1941. The colony offered Beach the perfect environment for her creative work: a direct experience of nature and the uninterrupted solitude of a studio of her own amid a community of creative workers. Beach was at the height of her career during these years. She mentored many of the younger women composers who came to work at the colony and composed much of her best music there. Beach became a devoted supporter of the MacDowell Colony. She organized benefit concerts and spoke passionately on its behalf whenever she had the chance. On her death, she left the rights to her music to the colony, a gift that continues to earn income today.

Mozart’s use of multiple musical forms and styles differentiates Die Zauberflöte from his previous works. Schikaneder’s audience expected a mixture of comedy and fine singing, added to which higher styles – ritual fanfares, hymns, and “learned” counterpoint – are presaged in the overture. The opera’s conclusion in which light banishes darkness is mirrored throughout – deceptively in the opening scene. The deployment of keys suggests less a system than choices made to suit a desired orchestration or a singer’s tessitura. The forms of arias reflect the status and emotions of each character. The finales differ from opera buffa in requiring scene-changes, reflected in musical styles including recitative, a strange march for the final trials of Pamina and Tamino, and a new tone and form for Papageno’s near-tragedy. The genii who intervene at critical points epitomize a mode peculiar to this opera, the comical sublime; the mixture of styles contributes to the opera’s strengths.

Amy Beach was a prolific composer for the piano and an accomplished concert pianist. This chapter explores her works for solo piano, encompassing her lifespan: from those composed as a young child to her Improvisations, op. 148, written in her late sixties. Beach wrote fluidly for the piano, with her intimate knowledge of the instrument coupled with her secure compositional skills culminating in a fantastic repertoire for piano. Her pieces include simple, pedagogic works; intricate character pieces; works in generic forms; and virtuosic works requiring advanced piano technique. This chapter sets out Beach’s prodigious oeuvre for solo piano chronologically, in the context of Beach’s life, exploring how her personal circumstances symbiotically influenced her compositional output. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of her few pieces for organ, piano duet, and two pianos.

This chapter focuses on The Magic Flute’s links to theatrical aesthetics of the Vienna court theater as well as debates surrounding the late eighteenth-century calls for the establishment of a German national theater tradition. This exploration suggests that Mozart’s unique experiences with the world of late eighteenth-century German theater traditions shaped The Magic Flute’s libretto significantly. Mozart’s contributions to Schikaneder’s libretto in fact enhance the work’s status as both a culmination of decades-long debates about German national theater and a harbinger of a future course for German national opera.

What is Enlightenment? In a certain sense, The Magic Flute may be understood as a playing out of Immanuel Kant’s answer to that question: “Sapere aude! [dare to know] – Have the courage to use your own understanding” – a challenge that is at the core of Tamino’s perilous journey. But the idea of Enlightenment and the complexity of original thought encompassed under its banner demands of us that we examine the deeper questions that it asks: What view of Enlightenment is conveyed in Mozart’s music and Schikaneder’s libretto, and how does this view accord with those strains of thought and expression, of wit and sensibility, that we take to constitute the defining aura of the Enlightenment? The great arias of Tamino and Pamina, studied as embodiments of these qualities, are viewed against the master plots of the opera.

The bafflingly eclectic exoticisms of The Magic Flute arise from at least three literary traditions at work in the libretto: seraglio or abduction opera (Tamino sets out heroically to rescue Pamina); The Arabian Nights (Papageno’s comic journey turns on wishes and their magical fulfilment), and a didactic, princely encounter with (some notion of) Egyptian antiquity (Act 2). A labile discourse of nature adds further complexity, encompassing the regulative and the remote, civilization and savagery. This chapter, treating exoticism not as a theme within the opera, but as what the opera is about, posits an over-arching notion of “Enlightened orientalism” (Srinivas Aravamudan). The opera offers both its fictional characters, and the audience, a series of potentially transformative encounters with (what is posited as) the ancient and original sources of culture. These encounters cut across, and sometimes problematize, distinctions of self and Other.