Eric Cutler in June 2009. He performed the Duke of Mantua in Giuseppe Verdi's "Rigoletto", in a Fenice's production, for a tour in Italy which involved Reggio Emilia and Venice. Cutler's most critically acclaimed performances have all been in Mozart operas. These include Tamino (Metropolitan Opera, Opera Theatre of St. Louis, Glyndebourne and Edinburgh Festivals), Belmonte in "The Abduction from the Seraglio" (Boston Lyric Opera, Houston Grand Opera and Teatro Real Madrid) and Don Ottavio in "Don Giovanni" (Wolf Trap Opera Company and Santa Fe Opera). EMI issued Eric Cutler's first solo recording featuring songs of Barber, Schumann, Hahn and Liszt, called
Libretto of The Magic Flute in the libretto. The opening eight bars of orchestral introduction to the duet "Pa pa pa", at the moment when Papagena is revealed to Papageno as his future wife, includes the stage direction that Papageno and Papagena "both engage during the ritornello in comic play." The experiences and background of the composer, who liked to have considerable input into the libretto (see "The Abduction from the Seraglio" for testimony), are also relevant. Nedbal writes, "Moral maxims appear frequently in eighteenth-century German drama and contemporary German theorists of theater often discuss them in their treatises. The main function of maxims is