馃惁 Where in the World is Papageno
EN 路 DE 路 FR 路 IT 路 ES 路 RU 路 JA 路 KO 路 PL 路 HU 路 SV
The prince gets the magic flute, the trials and the girl. The birdcatcher gets the laughs and, almost always, the loudest applause. Papageno has been stealing Die Zauberfl枚te since the night it opened, which is exactly what its author intended, because its author wrote the part for himself.
Emanuel Schikaneder ran the Theater auf der Wieden, wrote the libretto, and on September 30, 1791 walked on stage in a suit of feathers to sing Der Vogelf盲nger bin ich ja. He was a seasoned comic actor and knew precisely what a suburban Viennese audience wanted from him. Mozart, who liked him, gave the character folk-like strophic songs, a magic glockenspiel, and a signature that everyone leaves the theater humming: five ascending notes on the panpipes, a little rising scale the orchestra tosses back and forth, recurring through the opera like a whistle in the dark.
He is the human center of the fairy tale. Tamino is an ideal figure, brave, earnest, bound upward toward wisdom. Papageno wants supper, a glass of wine and somebody to love him. He fails every test he is given. Ordered to keep silent, he chatters; urged toward heroism, he asks whether it can wait until after dinner. And the opera never punishes him for any of it. His reward, in the end, is exactly what he asked for at the start.
His darkest scene is also his most loved. Alone in the Act Two finale, convinced he has lost Papagena forever, he takes a rope and prepares to hang himself, counting to three very slowly and hoping aloud that someone will interrupt. The Three Boys do, reminding him of his magic bells, and within a minute despair has tipped over into the giddy Pa-pa-pa duet, two half-bird creatures stammering their way into joy. Played well, the scene is funny and heartbreaking in the same breath, which is the whole character in miniature.
Audiences love him more than the hero because he is the one they recognize. Heroes pass trials; the rest of us mostly want dinner and company, and Mozart, who understood people at least as well as he understood counterpoint, gave that longing some of the opera's most durable tunes. Two centuries of great Papagenos, from Schikaneder himself to Gerhard H眉sch, Hermann Prey and Walter Berry, have kept the feathers in the family. This site is named after him for a reason. The question it answers every night is his kind of question, simple and human: where in the world is Papageno singing?
See where Die Zauberfl枚te is playing right now, worldwide.
Data: open sources (opera houses, ticketing platforms, Wikidata). Part of the worldwide Die Zauberfl枚te map.