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Who Were the Drei Knaben?

The remark was offhand, an afterthought. In a letter of October 7, 1791, to his wife, Constanze, relating the success of Die Zauberflöte’s opening run, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart reported on the evening’s three showstoppers: “As usual the duet ‘Mann und Weib’ and Papageno’s glockenspiel in Act I had to be repeated and also the trio of the boys in Act II.” This last number to which Mozart is referring is surely “Seid uns zum zweiten Mal wilkommen” (Be welcomed by us for the second time), sung by the Three Boys as they descend again in their flying machine, return the magic instruments to Tamino and Papageno, and give them food and instructions. But this “cute trio” (niedliche Terzett)—as one contemporary review of the keyboard score described it—seems an unlikely candidate for an encore. It is a wispy filigree of thirty-five measures, all in a thinly textured piano dynamic, spare in its rhythmic profile and relentlessly homophonic. It lacks even the melodiousness of the Singspiel’s other numbers with equally plain harmonic topographies (such as the other two encored numbers mentioned in Mozart’s letter). It comes at an unremarkable moment in the drama, and it unfolds in workaday poetry. It is a modest choice, in short, for an audience favorite. Yet from early in Die Zauberflöte’s career, the unassuming trio had an independent presence outside the theater, appearing in arrangements and adaptations in Vienna, Berlin, and London throughout the 1790s. The surprising popularity of the “cute trio” is just one of several perplexities regarding the Three Boys. At the premiere, the First Boy was portrayed by Anna Schikaneder, Emanuel’s niece, who at twenty-four was older even than the singer who created the role of Pamina. The Second and Third Boys—if they have been correctly identified—were played by two male singers aged fifteen and seventeen, probably local choristers recruited for the production, since they do not appear on any subsequent playbills or company rosters. The absence of any critical comment on the mixed-gender casting suggests that no one found this particularly troubling. But the ambiguity extends from casting to nomenclature: the premiere playbill left the Three Boys off entirely, and while they were restored to the playbill for the second performance (as “Drey Genien”), the performers’ names