The Magic Flute By W.A. Mozart

This edition is based on an early nineteenth century print, now kept at the Library of Congress in Washington DC that can be dated to circa 1824-25. A remark on the title page states that: "One could sing along with all the numbers, [thus] the intentions of Mozart have been preserved with exactitude. The guitar part is accessible to all amateurs." This marketing ploy was often used by publishers, appealing to an amateur market which consisted of guitarists with basic technical proficiency. Obviously, this was not a publication intended for the concert stage, but rather for private performance at home. On examining this arrangement, we can see that the sequence of the numbers and the choice of tonalities does not correspond to the sequence of numbers and their tonalities in known editions of The Magic Flute. Obviously, de Lhoyer had not attempted to arrange the entire opera. Moreover, the sequence he chose for the pieces has no relationship to the Mozart opera and to its original story line. Only seven of the pieces retain the original key, and six of the numbers vary in tonality by a semitone in either direction, with the exception of N° 10 that is a whole tone off the original. This edition is a perfect vehicle for the introduction of intermediate guitar students to the performance of chamber music with other musicians. Precisely because the sequence of the numbers does not follow the original story line of the opera, there seems to be an obvious disconnect between the separate movements of this apparent suite of famous melodies, suggesting that individual movements of the arrangement could be performed independently of the entire work in any suitable combination. However, attempts to reconstruct the entire arrangement along the lines of the original opera, considering that it includes original variations added by de Lhoyer, would be an artificial conflation and a distortion of both Mozart’s The Magic Flute and this arrangement of it by Antoine de Lhoyer.