The performance of The Magic Flute was the outcome of a century of aristocratic experiments and creative inducements that had filtered into popular culture of late eighteenth-century Vienna. The impresario Schikaneder introduced the ingenious machines of the baroque courts to a new theater-going public.

Orenstein, “Our Puppets Ourselves” Mime Journal

Check Aronson edited books re: scenography and puppetry

Schikaneder’s productions and love of special effects and costume (see image of Sch playing Papagano).

Puppets: the Flute, the image of Pamina, bird in cage, serpent, bells.

Teaching an ape to sing… (???)

Human/machine tension — humanness of objects and machine-like humans (in context of Enlightenment and principles of comic opera/drama). Bergson theory on comedy.

Human perfection and the Uber-Marionette (Craig)?

Sofia Pantouvaki, “Children’s opera Brundibar in Thereseinstadt (1943-44) and the power of scenographic metaphors,” THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE DESIGN 2018, VOL. 4, NO. 3, 173-203.