Literaire reacties in Nederland op Mozarts Die Zauberflöte (1799-1809)

In April 1799, Amsterdam saw the premiere of De toverfluit, the Dutch translation of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. The opera had already been introduced in the Dutch capital five years earlier, in the original German. Unlike that earlier performance, the first staging in Dutch elicited several comments in the literary press. The reviews were invariably critical of the storyline, the characters and the quality of the translation, whereas the music itself was largely passed over in silence. This article takes a closer look at how De toverfluit was lampooned by Dutch writers during the period 1799-1809. Much of the criticism should be seen as part of a larger debate that had erupted over the influx of modern German theatrical fare at the expense of plays written in the classicist (French) tradition. From a literary-historical perspective, the premiere of De toverfluit is also significant in that it gave rise to the first poems in Dutch devoted to Mozart and his work.