becomes a powerful spirit whose service is at the command of the possessor.  With the help of genii, struck from the magical implement, and the fairy whom he summons at the last, Prince Lulu overcomes all the obstacles placed in his way.  Discomfited, the magician flies away as an owl.  Perifirime destroys the castle and carries the lovers in a cloud chariot to her own palace.  Their royal fathers give their blessings, and Prince Lulu and Princess Sidi are joined in wedlock.

Following in a general way the lines of this story, but supplying the comic element by the creation of Papageno (who is Kasperl in a habiliment of feathers), Schikaneder had already got his hero into the castle of the wicked magician in quest of the daughter of the Queen of Night (in whose character there was not yet a trace of maleficence), when the success of his rival’s earlier presentation of the story gave him pause.  Now there came to him (or to his literary colleague) a conceit which fired the imagination of Mozart and added an element to the play which was bound at once to dignify it and create a popular stir that might lead to a triumph.  Whence the suggestion came is not known, but its execution, so far as the libretto was concerned, was left to Gieseke.  Under the Emperor Leopold II the Austrian government had adopted a reactionary policy toward the order of Freemasons, which was suspected of making propaganda for liberal ideas in politics and religion.  Both Schikaneder and Mozart belonged to the order, Mozart, indeed, being so enthusiastic a devotee that he once confessed to his father his gratitude to God that through Freemasonry he had learned to look upon death as the gateway to true happiness.  In continuing the book of the opera, Schikaneder (or Gieseke for him) abruptly transformed the wicked magician into a virtuous sage who had carried off the daughter of a wicked sorceress, the Queen of Night, to save the maiden from the baleful influence of her mother.  Instead of seeking to frustrate the efforts of the prince who comes to rescue her, the sage initiates him into the mysteries of Isis, leads him into the paths of virtue and wisdom, tests him by trials, and rewards him at the last by blessing his union with the maiden.  The trials of silence, secrecy, and hardihood in passing through the dread elements of fire and water were ancient literary materials; they may be found in the account of the initiation of a neophyte into the mysteries of Isis in Apuleius’s “Metamorphoses; or, The Golden Ass,” a romance written in the second century.  By placing the scene of the opera in Egypt, the belief of Freemasons that their order originated in that unspeakably ancient land was humored, while the use of some of its symbolism (such as the conflict between light and darkness) and the proclamation of what were believed to be some of its ethical principles could safely be relied upon to delight the knowing and irritate the curiosity of the uninitiated.  The change also led to the shabby treatment which woman receives in the opera, while Schikaneder’s failure to rewrite the first part accounts for such inconsistencies as the genii who are sent to guide the prince appearing first in the service of the evil principle and afterward as agents of the good.