Mozart conducted the premiere of The Magic Flute in Vienna
On this day · 30 September 1791
Just two months before his death, Mozart led the first performance of his last operatic masterwork before a suburban Viennese crowd.
On September 30, 1791, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart took up the baton at the Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden, a suburban playhouse on the edge of Vienna, and conducted the premiere of Die Zauberflöte — The Magic Flute. It was his final opera, and he had barely two months left to live.
The evening was a family-and-friends affair as much as a grand debut. The librettist and impresario Emanuel Schikaneder ran the theater and sang the bird-catcher Papageno himself, while Mozart’s sister-in-law Josepha Hofer sang the stratospheric Queen of the Night.
A Singspiel mixing spoken dialogue with arias, it spoke to ordinary Viennese rather than the court — and they came in droves.
There were no reviews of those first nights, yet the success was unmistakable. The little theater mounted well over 100 performances within a year, and The Magic Flute has never really left the stage since.
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