Arts and Humanities Commons^™

From Arcadia To Elysium In The Magic Flute And Weimar Classicism: The Plan Of Salvation And Eighteenth-Century Views Of Moral Progression, John B. Fowles

BYU Studies Quarterly

The painful sighs are now past.

Elysium's joyful banquets

Drown the slightest moan—

Elysium's life is

Eternal rapture, eternal flight;

Through laughing meadows a brook pipes its tune.

..........

Here faithful couples embrace each other,

Kiss on the velvet green sward

As the soothing west wind caresses them;

Here love is crowned,

Safe from death's merciless blow

It celebrates an eternal wedding feast.

—Friedrich Schiller

European Views Of Egyptian Magic And Mystery: A Cultural Context For The Magic Flute, Kerry Muhlestein

BYU Studies Quarterly

Composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and librettist Emanuel Schikaneder lived and created during the height of eighteenth-century interest in and fascination with Egypt. The Magic Flute's Egyptial setting would therefore evoke in their contemporaneous audience notions of a distant land with an exotic and magical culture. The numerous Egyptian elements of the world are representative of its era and are situated near the end of a continuum of European thought about ancient Egypt before the solid foundation of modern day Egyptology had been laid. To Europeans, Egypt was a murky and mysterious landscape, one that easily lent itself to imaginative …