Papageno Redux: Repetition and the Rewriting of Character in Sequels to Die Zauberflöte

TLDR: A sculpture of the bird catcher from Mozart's Die Zauberflöte (fig. 1) is located at the entrance of the Theater an der Wien in Vienna as mentioned in this paper.

Abstract: Perched high above what was once the main entrance to the Theater an der Wien in Vienna is a sculpture of the bird catcher from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (fig. 1). Papageno sits beside his empty birdcage, playing his panpipe. In his company are three children, whose feathered costumes and curly hair resemble Papageno’s own. One of the children holds a panpipe, another a parrot, while the third seems to gesture to visitors of the theater to approach quietly. The sculpture commemorates Emanuel Schikaneder’s most famous role—the role that, arguably, financed his construction of and relocation to the Theater an der Wien. At the same time, however, the sculpture offers a deeper reading of Papageno and his post-Zauberflöte career. With its emphasis on Papageno as a progenitor, this image concretizes the themes of repetition and regeneration that underlie the character and his reception in the wake of Die Zauberflöte. Repetition, as scholars have noted, is ubiquitous in Mozart and Schikaneder’s characterization of Papageno. The unrelenting replay of his signature five-note panpipe scale and the stuttering reiterations of “hm” and “pa” articulate his simple nature. They also make Papageno instantly recognizable, and they provide an impetus for further regeneration. Repetition, in other words, served as a prerequisite for Papageno’s enduring popularity and his eventual promotion to a comic archetype of German opera by the century’s end. Papageno had an extensive afterlife in the many sequels and adaptations that followed Die Zauberflöte, including Christian August Vulpius’s adaptation for the Weimar Theater (1794); Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s fragmentary, unrealized sequel (1794–1800); Les mystères d’Isis (1801) by Etienne Morel de Chédeville and Ludwig Wenzel Lachnith, a version staged at the Paris Opéra; Karl Meisl and Wenzel Müller’s Die travestirte Zauberflöte (1818); and Anton Wilhelm Florentin von Zuccalmaglio’s Der Kederich (1834). In addition to these works, two other revisitations of Die Zauberflöte grant an unusually prominent role to Papageno: Peter Winter and Emanuel Schikaneder’s sequel, Das Labyrinth oder der Kampf mit den Elementen (1798), and an adaptation by the composer Friedrich Himmel