Since its premiere in 1791, The Magic Flute has been staged continuously and remains, to this day, Mozart\’s most-performed opera worldwide. This comprehensive, user-friendly, up-to-date critical guide considers the opera in a variety of contexts to provide a fresh look at a work that has continued to fascinate audiences from Mozart\’s time to ours. It serves both as an introduction for those encountering the opera for the first time and as a treasury of recent scholarship for those who know it very well. Containing twenty-one essays by leading scholars, and drawing on recent research and commentary, this Companion presents original insights on music, dialogue, and spectacle, and offers a range of new perspectives on key issues, including the opera\’s representation of exoticism, race, and gender. Organized in four sections historical context, musical analysis, critical approaches, and reception it provides an essential framework for understanding The Magic Flute and its extraordinary afterlife.

• Presents fresh insights on music, dialogue, and spectacle, and offers a range of new perspectives on topics including the opera\’s representation of exoticism, race, and gender
• Provides an up-to-date, broad-ranging, and accessible overview of recent scholarly debates and places the opera in its historical and present-day intellectual contexts
• Offers an essential starting point and frame of reference for anyone studying the opera as well as a guide to navigating the complex and often contradictory scholarly literature devoted to it