Design for The Magic Flute: The Hall of Stars in the Palace of the Queen of the Night, Act 1, Scene 6

Karl Friedrich Schinkel

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Schinkel, the most prominent and prolific German architect of the nineteenth century, also worked for Berlin’s major theatrical stages. His designs for a 1816 production of Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflöte remain his best known. Inspired by the Masonic themes incorporated in the opera’s libretto, most of Schinkel’s sets are in a resolutely Egyptian style.The pair shown here at left evokes the land reigned over by the evil Queen of the Night; the two at right are for the opera’s second act, when the princely pair Tamino and Pamina progress through the realm of Sarastro. A selection of thirty-two designs was published several times from 1819 on; the Museum’s impressions appear to be from the first edition. Great care was taken in the publication of the plates, which were finished by hand.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art