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Wolfang Amadeus Mozart's Magic Flute is usually listed among Freud's favorite operas. Jones (1953), in his report of the three operas he mentioned in the decade of 1880-1890, stated:
Then [after Bizet's Carmen and Mozart's Don Giovanni] there was nothing for two years, when he decided to complete his Mozart education by seeing the Magic Flute [emphasis added]. This proved rather disappointing. “Some of the arias are wonderfully beautiful, but the whole thing rather drags, without any really individual melodies. The action is very stupid, the libretto quite crazy, and it is simply not to be compared with Don Giovanni.” (p. 178)
In this statement two points are noteworthy. First, according to the Köchel catalogue, Mozart has nineteen finished operas (Thompson, 1938)! So how could Freud's Mozart education be considered “complete” if he only saw three of these? As I recently highlighted in this Journal, Jones forgot to include The Marriage of Figaro, which he had just mentioned in a previous page (Díaz de Chumaceiro, 1990). Evidently, one has to assume that Jones excluded Mozart's other works from this statement, because only operas are mentioned in the quote. Did Jones, then, with this intriguing remark, simply mean that Freud saw Mozart's last opera?
However, Trosman (1985) recently reminded readers of a bit of previously published data: “At seventeen, offered a choice between Schiller's Die Rauber and Mozart's Magic Flute, he could still opt for The Magic Flute (Freud, 1969)” (emphasis added, p. 74). Perhaps there is a wealth of material on Mozart still waiting to be revealed when all of Freud's letters are finally published.
The second point is that Freud's reaction at this particular performance (from a still unpublished letter) reveals that he was not as ignorant about music as he himself claimed. Wortis (1984), for example, quoted Freud as