The man who gave Mozart his last great opera first met the composer in Salzburg in 1780. Emanuel Schikaneder ran a touring theatre company, spent a season managing the city theatre, and struck up a friendship with the Mozart family that would produce one of the most performed operas in history eleven years later.
The Story
Emanuel Schikaneder arrived in Salzburg in 1780 with his touring troupe and quickly became a familiar presence in the Mozart household. The relationship was close enough for shared meals and air-rifle contests in the Archbishop's garden, and both men were Freemasons, a brotherhood that gave their friendship an additional dimension. Leopold Mozart watched Schikaneder's rehearsals with interest; the young Wolfgang found in him a kindred spirit who believed opera should speak to everyone, not just the court.
When Schikaneder moved to Vienna and took over the Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden, he began looking for a subject that could combine fairy-tale spectacle with Masonic ideas. He wrote the libretto himself and in 1791 approached Mozart to compose the music. The result was Die Zauberflote (The Magic Flute), which premiered on 30 September 1791 with Schikaneder in the role of Papageno. The production ran over a hundred times in its first months, an extraordinary success for a two-act Singspiel.
Schikaneder used the profits to build the Theater an der Wien, which opened in 1801. But the Salzburg chapter was always the beginning: without that season of picnics and rehearsals and shared enthusiasm in the shadow of the Hohensalzburg, the friendship might never have formed and the opera might never have been written. The Salzburg connection is the starting point of a relationship that ended in Vienna with a masterpiece.
The arc of Schikaneder's life is instructive. He went from a poor Bavarian boy who sang in the Regensburg cathedral choir to the impresario who shaped the Viennese stage, and then lost everything in his final years. He died in Vienna in 1812, largely forgotten, while the opera he had made continued its conquest of the world.
