"Carl" and "Ludwig". The late Vienna journey and the Magic Flute authorship controversy In 1817, Giesecke obtained leave of absence from his position and embarked on a long journey. He first visited Copenhagen in order to deal with business unfinished following his departure there for Greenland 11 years earlier. While there he fell ill, and "his life was despaired of" (Berry). He recovered, however, and continued onward to his birthplace of Augsburg, and eventually back to his old haunts in Vienna, with stops in various German cities on the way. The main purpose of Giesecke's Vienna journey was to donate a collection of mineralogical specimens to the Emperor of Austria, Francis I. While there, he encountered old acquaintances from the theater. The tenor and opera manager Julius Cornet was present at such an encounter (Ignaz Seyfried, an old member of the Schikaneder troupe, was also there). Cornet wrote—three decades later, in 1849—the following: <blockquote> On this occasion we discovered a lot about old times; amongst other things we learnt to see in him (who at that time had belonged to the prohibited order of freemasons) the real author of The Magic Flute (which moreover Seyfried already suspected.) I'm relating all this according to his own statement which we had no reason to doubt. ... Many thought that the prompter Helmböck had collaborated with Schikaneder. But Giesecke corrected us on this point too; only the figure of Papageno and the latter’s counterpart Papagena did he attribute to Schikaneder.</blockquote> Elsewhere Cornet wrote: And above all the truly German Magic Flute by Schikaneder and Giesecke, a member of the chorus who made the plan of the plot, the division of the scenes and the well known simple ('naïve') rhymes for him. Subsequent scholarship has involved extensive disagreement about whether to believe Cornet, ranging from wholehearted endorsement of his report to utter rejection of it accompanied by aspersions on Giesecke's character. Certainly Mozart's own testimony does not support the Giesecke theory; in the catalogue that Mozart kept of his own works he entered The Magic Flute as "A German opera in two acts. By Emanuel Schikaneder." However, there is also a reasonable possibility that Giesecke was an unacknowledged collaborator with Schikaneder; the troupe frequently practiced coauthorship as a means of speeding the creation of new works. Giesecke returned to Dublin in the late summer of 1819 and resumed his duties as professor. Fieldwork in