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ABSTRACT:

When Papageno first enters the stage in Die Zauberflöte, the stage directions indicate that he holds “a Faunen-Flötchen with both hands'' and that he “pipes and sings.” Despite the copious scholarship on this opera, on the character of Papageno, and on the status of the various objects that play central roles in the opera’s main action, surprisingly little attention has been given to the pipes that Papageno plays. Of course, they haven’t been wholly ignored: in Subotnik’s now classic essay, “Whose Magic Flute?” she accords the pipes a central role in our understanding of the musical universe of the opera, writing, “It is Papageno’s humble pipes that delimit the claims of Mozart’s mighty opera to be understood only within the terms on which is presents itself, and that establish a basis within the opera for criticizing the Magic Flute’s reading of itself as a corroboration of Enlightenment values.”  

Underlying Subotnik’s elegant reading is an assumption that the panpipes were indeed a materially and timbrally different kind of thing from the surrounding orchestral instruments. Indeed, most scholars have assumed, implicitly or explicitly, that Papageno plays his own instrument and that the instrument he plays is a panpipe. While it seems probable that, in the original production, Schikaneder did indeed play his own instrument, evidence suggests it is unlikely that he played an actual panpipe. Nevertheless, in the years following the premiere of the Magic Flute, the image and concept of the panpipe became intimately bound up with the character of Papageno and the opera. The goal of this paper is two-fold: first I explore both the status of panpipes in the late eighteenth century and surviving the organological and iconographical evidence to think about what sort of instrument Papageno might have played. Second, I reflect on the lessons we might learn from the pipe’s aerophonic ambiguities: how much does it matter what instrument Papageno plays (or if Papageno even plays at all)? And what might it tell us about both the limits of both timbre studies and organology that the nature of Papageno’s pipes has been so long ignored?