Emanuel Schikaneder elements and traditional fairy-tale themes (see "Libretto of The Magic Flute"). Schikaneder took the role of Papageno—a character reflecting the Hanswurst tradition, and thus suited to his skills—at the premiere. According to the dramatist Ignaz Franz Castelli, Schikaneder also may have given advice to Mozart concerning the musical setting of his libretto: The late bass singer Sebastian Mayer told me that Mozart had originally written the duet where Papageno and Papagena first see each other quite differently from the way in which we now hear it. Both originally cried out "Papageno!", "Papagena!" a few times in amazement. But when Schikaneder
Mozart and Salieri (opera) Mozart and Salieri (opera) Mozart and Salieri (, "Motsart i Salyeri") is a one-act opera in two scenes by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, written in 1897 to a Russian libretto taken almost verbatim from Alexander Pushkin's 1830 verse drama of the same name. The story follows the apocryphal legend that Antonio Salieri poisoned Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart out of jealousy over the latter's music. Rimsky-Korsakov incorporated quotations from Mozart's "Requiem" and "Don Giovanni" into the score. Richard Taruskin has placed this opera in the historical context of the development of the realistic tradition in Russian opera. The first performance took place at the