Who actually played it that first night — I went looking, because I wanted to know if the composer was in the room. He was. Mozart at the keyboard, conducting, and only for the first two performances; after that he handed it off and 1791 got on with itself. Nine weeks or so later he was gone.
And it's a house band, really. Schikaneder wrote the words and then went out and sang Papageno himself, in his own theatre, out in the Wieden — a wooden place in the suburbs, not the fancy end of town. The Queen of the Night was Josepha Hofer, his sister-in-law, up there on those high F's night after night, which is a family favour of a very particular kind. Listen for those F's sometime and think of a brother-in-law writing them for you on purpose.
There's a stage painting going round with it, deep blue night, rows and rows of white stars, one small dark-robed figure standing on a silver crescent above the clouds.
That blue with the rows of stars is Schinkel's, Otis — an architect doing scenery, drawn in 1815 for Berlin, a good twenty-odd years after the wooden house in the Wieden. He set the stars in strict rows, the way you'd rule a facade, and everyone since has had that picture in their head instead of whatever the suburb actually managed with candles.
Otis, that wooden house in the courtyard out there was rigged like a fairground — trapdoors, winches, machines for flying things in and out — and Schikaneder used the lot. He knew what he had, which is why the boys come down out of the air and the serpent arrives from below. Papageno's an actor's part written by the actor who owned the stage.