In Search of Panpipes, or the Limits of Materiality

This essay’s departure point is Mozart’s singspiel, The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte, 1791), and the beloved character of Papageno, who first enters the stage holding a “Faunen-Flötchen” that he pipes. Despite the copious scholarship on this opera, on the character of Papageno, and on the status of the various musical objects that play central roles in the opera’s main action, surprisingly little attention has been given to the pipes that Papageno plays. I trace a history of panpipes in the late eighteenth century to think about their many possible associations (avian, pastoral, and mercantile) and delve into the surviving organological and iconographical evidence to think about what sort of instrument Papageno might have played and why. While it seems likely that, in the original production, Emanuel Schikaneder—the opera’s librettist and first Papageno—did indeed play his own instrument, it is unlikely that he used actual panpipes. Nevertheless, in the years following the premiere of the The Magic Flute, panpipes became intimately bound up with the character of Papageno and the opera, even acquiring the name Papagenopfeife. The minimal attention given to the panpipes, however, is not a sign of musicological or organological sloppiness, but rather evidence of the power of the idea of panpipes, one so compelling that it continually overrides direct material and sonic evidence. The panpipes’ many meanings, and their ability to live as much in the imagination as on the stage, begin to show us where the boundaries between the material and immaterial lies.