WHO WAS THE REAL PAPAGENO?

Papageno as he appeared in Berlin, 1816.

When I interviewed our conductor, Antony Walker, he said something that surprised me—and made so much sense!

“We’re all accustomed to thinking of Emanuel Schikaneder as Papageno,” he said, “because he wrote and created the role for himself as the star of the opera. But there is so much of Mozart in Papageno—it seems a real autobiographical element that this good-humored little guy is playing a wonderful cut-down piano.”

Walker is referring to the glockenspiel, the twinkling instrument that is played offstage to represent Papageno’s magic bells. It’s the same adorable instrument that Tchaikovsky used for the Sugar Plum Fairy. The glockenspiel (GLOCK-un-shpeel—means “bell player” in German) has a keyboard and is about half the size of a modern upright piano.

In a letter to his wife, Mozart wrote about sneaking backstage to play a trick on Schikaneder by playing the bells at the wrong time—look for the anecdote in “Fun Facts”.

Mozart was a famous practical joker and had a hard time holding a straight face at times. In fact, he and his good friend, the composer Josef Haydn, once disrupted a Masonic lodge meeting with their antics.

Walker pointed to Mozart’s loving relationship with his wife, née Constanze Weber, as another link to the Papageno character. Since they were frequently apart, he wrote her many letters. “Every letter he sends her starts with, “My dearest, most wonderful wife—words like that. He was so affectionate with his wife, very sweet. He seemed to long for her just as much as Papageno longs for a sweet wife to keep him company and bear his children.”

Constanze Mozart painted by Josef Lange, 1782

I asked Walker if he thought the relationship of Tamino and Pamina might be an echo of the Mozart marriage, too.

“The union of man and woman was something that Mozart espoused—he talks to Constanze in letters as an equal. He was so dependent on her, and it seemed like they matched each other just beautifully. I see not only the courage of his Masonic convictions, but the wonderfully complete nature of his own domestic life.”

A final note on Constanze: she has been held in low esteem by commentators since Mozart’s death in 1791. The movie Amadeus falls into line with the portrait of her as a big-bosomed bimbo. The last chapter of H.C. Robbins Landon’s absorbing book 1791: Mozart’s Last Year (1988) is called “Constanze: a vindication.” It is one of the first attempts to resurrect Constanze’s reputation, and since that time there have been a number of books that deal with Mozart’s family life and his relationships with women.

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