Da Camera 23: The Little Magic Flute

Contents

A collection of arranged tunes from Mozart's opera.
You are holding a collection of the best-known scenes from the first act of The Magic Flute. They are adapted for performance as an easy instrumental suite for pupils who have covered the elementary stage. Accordingly, most of the tunes have been transposed ' the original is full of flats! ' shortened and linked together without following the order in which they appear in the opera. The instrumental group comprises two fixed instruments: piano-four-hands and a flute (since a Magic Flute without a flute is unthinkable!) and two other free-choice instruments, one high-pitched one (oboe, violin, clarinet) and one low one (cello or basson). The markings 'pizzicato' and 'arc' only applies to string instruments. If you play it with wind instruments you can either play the 'pizzicato' notes softly and short or just 'tacet'.
The novel feature of this ensemble is perhaps the piano-four-hands, which was brought in for two reasons: with two pianists, the piano finds it easier to take on an orchestral dimension, and in addition more pianists can join in with chamber-music groups. This latter point is particularly practical in view of the way piano students tend to outnumber students of other instruments in many music schools. The four-hands arrangement is based directly on the orchestral part, and you will see that the piano part is an adaptation of the orchestral score rather than a reduction of it.