Turkey. Eighteenth century. Belmonte, a Spanish nobleman, has been separated by pirates from Constanze, the woman he loves. He has reason to believe that Constanze was sold as a slave to the Pasha Selim, and he has tracked her to the Pasha’s estate. Here in the Ottoman Empire—a world 18th-century Europe thought aggressive, barbaric and faintly ludicrous—four Westerners find one another, themselves, and new appreciation of the East.
ACT I
At the outer wall Belmonte encounters the dour gatekeeper, Osmin, who rudely dismisses his overtures and scares him away. Belmonte then finds his own manservant, Pedrillo, who confirms that Constanze, her English chambermaid Blonde, and he are now indeed property of the Pasha. Pedrillo has become gardener to the Pasha, a cultivated man whose building and landscaping achievements are renowned. Pedrillo enjoys unusual freedom on the grounds, as well as the hatred of Osmin, to whom the Pasha has given his sweetheart Blonde as a gift. When Belmonte hears that the Pasha loves Constanze and has been pursuing her, he wonders if she has remained faithful to him. Belmonte and Pedrillo make a plan to abduct Constanze and Blonde that night and escape.
When the Pasha and Constanze return from a boating excursion, Belmonte sees Constanze at last and listens as the Pasha offers his love to her, threatening force if she does not accept him. Later, Pedrillo introduces Belmonte to the Pasha as a talented architect, and the Pasha sets an appointment for the next day—but Osmin still won’t allow Belmonte into the palace as he suspects Belmonte of having come to steal women from the harem. Belmonte and Pedrillo trick Osmin, and Belmonte manages to gain access.
ACT II
Osmin orders Blonde to love him, as he has every reason to expect that a woman belonging to him should. Blonde is appalled. She will not accept that women are wares to be traded, and she explains that Western women prefer to be courted with tenderness, kindness and humor. Osmin has trouble accepting this, though Blonde enchants him. Later, Blonde tries to comfort Constanze and, understanding that her mistress’s distress hinges on an attraction to the Pasha, encourages her to make a choice. Constanze, with no time left to stall the Pasha, mourns her separation from Belmonte, and when the Pasha appears she struggles with her conflicting feelings. When he speaks of the tortures she, and even he, will suffer if she rejects him, she appeals to his reason and humanity but ultimately stands up to him. Blonde wonders at Constanze’s strength: if Pedrillo were not around she is not sure she could resist an appeal from the heart. Constanze’s behavior also impresses the Pasha: he wonders momentarily if she might find her strength in a hope of escape.
Pedrillo tells Blonde that Belmonte has found them. He explains that they will all escape at midnight after he has drugged Osmin, and that meanwhile Constanze can speak to Belmonte in the palace after dark. Pedrillo then musters his courage and succeeds in subduing Osmin with spiked wine. Constanze and Belmonte are briefly but happily reunited. Belmonte and Pedrillo confess their jealous fears to Constanze and Blonde, and both women are confused and hurt. But all four talk it through and find their balance again, then they separate to await the hour appointed for the escape.
ACT III
Belmonte and Pedrillo meet under Constanze’s window just before midnight. Pedrillo brings a ladder and sings a serenade, and at length the women appear. In the midst of the escape, Osmin weaves around the corner to find the ladder. The four lovers are captured in flight. Osmin, outraged by their deceit (particularly Blonde’s), promises torture and death. When the Pasha appears, Belmonte tells him he is from a noble family that will pay handsomely for his release. His name is Lostados. This name is not new to the Pasha. He suffered the great humiliation of his life—loss of love and homeland—to another Lostados, Belmonte’s father. The Pasha asks Belmonte what his father would do were he in the Pasha’s position now. The four captives are bound and left alone as the Pasha and Osmin go to prepare their torture. Constanze tells Belmonte that death cannot stop their love, it can only free them to love peacefully, and Belmonte understands that with her he can do anything, even welcome death. This is the real end of his long search for love. The Pasha returns and forgives them, because he will not repay ill with ill and because he loves Constanze. He frees both pairs of lovers and sends them home, causing Osmin great anguish. Taking their leave, the four lovers offer their respect and gratitude for the gifts the Pasha has given them.
Mozart’s Fresh Start:
The Abduction from the Seraglio
When Mozart first turned his attention to Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) in the summer of 1781, it was with a potent mix of creative excitement and anxiety. The stakes, as he was keenly aware, were high. Mozart had arrived at the most precarious position of his career to date, only a few months on in his quest to survive as a freelance artist in Vienna. And opera, which he desired more than anything to write, was the realm most likely to secure his international standing as a composer.
The recent break with his hated boss, PrinceArchbishop Colloredo of Salzburg, may have seemed inevitable, but its suddenness came as a shock. Now, at 25, Mozart was finally on his own—artistically and personally—in the hugely competitive Habsburg capital. He determined never again to be trapped in the native Salzburg he scorned as provincial. Writing to his father Leopold to vindicate this risky bid for independence, the composer optimistically declared that “it seems as if good fortune is waiting to embrace me here.”
Mozart’s prediction proved accurate with regard to the new operatic adventure that resulted in Abduction. Even before the crisis with the Archbishop had reached its breaking point, he was cultivating useful contacts, including Johann Gottlieb Stephanie the Younger, a jackofalltrades of the theater world who held the very important position of director of the National Singspiel. This company was closely associated with the court as part of a fledgling project instituted in 1778 by Joseph II, the Austrian emperor and a theater aficionado, to encourage the development of Germanlanguage opera. Stephanie’s responsibilities as “house poet” included preparing librettos that would be suitable for the National Singspiel. He translated existing French and Italian operas into German or “borrowed” texts by other German librettists for Viennese composers to set anew; he also wrote his own plays and librettos. Stephanie had the emperor’s ear and, although he was reputed to be a manipulative and untrustworthy player, he fortunately took a favorable attitude toward Mozart.
Stephanie in fact closely shaped Mozart’s operatic debut in Vienna. He not only helped engineer a commission for the National Singspiel but selected a libretto for Mozart to set and then tailored it extensively when the composer requested changes. (A few years later, Stephanie also wrote the libretto for and played himself in Der Schauspieldirektor [The Impresario], Mozart’s oneact comic singspiel about theater intrigue.) At first, the plan was to introduce a fresh opera by Mozart as part of the festivities showcasing Vienna’s cultural life on the occasion of a diplomatic visit by Grand Duke Paul Petrovich of Russia (son of Catherine the Great) and his wife. By the end of July, Stephanie had chosen Belmont und Constanze, oder die Entführung aus dem Serail (Belmont and Constanze, or The Abduction from the Seraglio), the most recent libretto by Christoph Friedrich Bretzner, for Mozart to compose. Already set by another composer for a Berlin company earlier that year, it would nevertheless be new to Vienna.
Bretzner was a Leipzig businessman who had developed a side career as a popular playwright and librettist. He specialized in comically plotted opera texts that were ideal for the German genre of singspiel (literally, “sungplay”), which at the time was comparable to the structure of an oldfashioned Broadway musical comedy: essentially a spoken play where the action stops intermittently for musical numbers (although the setups for these interludes tend to be more casual and arbitrary). Bretzner’s work was especially fashionable among Germanspeaking audiences. In fact, Stephanie had just adapted one of his earlier texts for the use of another National Singspiel composer, Ignaz Umlauf (a rival whose music Mozart mocks in his letters); it would also score a hit for the company. Moreover, at this stage Stephanie likely assumed that the Abduction text required minimal tweaking (if any). The royal visit by Duke Paul was scheduled for September, leaving no time to fuss. Stephanie foresaw a quick and easy production. He intended to provide a pleasant surprise for Joseph’s court, showing his company off in a sparkling light while also flattering the Emperor with the opera’s faddish depiction of an enlightened ruler (in the magnanimous decision of Pasha Selim, which brings a happy conclusion). On top of this, Mozart’s career would be getting an impressive boost.
Rethinking the Opera
Tight deadlines were, of course, second nature to the composer. Indeed, he was champing at the bit and dashed off the first of Bretzner’s three acts within a week. “I’m now hurrying to my desk with greatest eagerness,” Mozart wrote to his father. The original plan fell through, however, when the Russian royal entourage postponed its visit by a few months. As it happened, several tragic operas by Gluck were chosen for performance by the company so as to give a loftier tone to the festivities. But the deferral of Abduction’s premiere until the following summer offered a great creative advantage. Instead of speeding ahead with the Bretzner setting, Mozart now had ample time—a good deal longer than was the case with any of his other major operas—to reflect on his approach.
Moreover, his first year in Vienna brought new artistic stimulation—Mozart cultivated close friendships within the city’s lively theatrical milieu—as well as considerable emotional turmoil. Estrangement with his father developed over the composer’s engagement to Constanze Weber. All these experiences fed into Mozart’s work on Abduction. What had begun as a lightweight entertainment evolved into an opera of far more richly varied texture, into which he channeled his most conflicting emotions. In the process, Abduction prompted fresh approaches to the challenge of giving musical dimension to dramatic characters.
Mozart is often characterized, like Bach and Handel, as an essentially conservative composer who worked within prevailing traditions. But Abduction shows Mozart at his most innovative, pressing beyond the straightforward bounds of singspiel. In fact, Johann Goethe, who at the time was experimenting with writing singspiel librettos for his Weimar theater, lamented the fact that Mozart changed the game with Abduction. “All our endeavors to limit ourselves to economy and simplicity were lost the moment Mozart appeared on the scene,” the poet wrote.
This innovative spirit is all the more impressive since Mozart had just accomplished another breakthrough with his previous opera, Idomeneo, which kept him immersed in the vastly different world of Italian opera seria. Mozart had relatively little experience to draw on when it came to singspiel. Only two of his own previous operas were of this genre: Bastien und Bastienne (an effort from childhood) and the unperformed torso Zaide, which Mozart had set aside to compose Idomeneo. Actually, he had initially proposed Zaide to Stephanie as a candidate for the National Singspiel before the Abduction text was chosen. (The impresario convinced Mozart that Zaide, which happens to involve a similar though darker seraglio setting—there’s even an overseer named Osmin—would be too serious for Viennese taste.)
Mozart asked for sweeping changes to Bretzner’s libretto. While Stephanie obliged, the composer—following a pattern he had already shown with Idomeneo and would continue with librettist Lorenzo da Ponte—collaborated actively, making countless suggestions. In general, the changes did two things: They enhanced the role of music in creating the world of Abduction and they introduced deeper emotional currents as the opera progresses.
Mozart sought to integrate the music more closely into the narrative momentum of the opening scene, for example, which was originally mostly spoken, with a single interlude for Osmin’s folklike lied (“Wer ein Liebchen hat gefunden” [“Whoever has found a lover”]). He added an introductory aria for Belmonte, which was linked directly to the overture (itself an ambiguous interplay, alternately extroverted and introverted). Other additions to the opening included a duet between the hero and Osmin and an extra aria for the latter (“Solche hergelaufne Laffen” [“Such vagabonds!”]). Mozart even jotted down musical ideas for the added Osmin aria, for which he asked Stephanie to invent text. The result was a continuous musical sequence (with minimal spoken interruption) to set the opera in motion—a technique Mozart would perfect for the opening of Don Giovanni.
What’s more, this afforded him room to expand Osmin into an unforgettable musical character. (In Bretzner, his lied had been the only musical solo for Osmin.) Of course he’s a comic exaggeration, based on a crude stereotype, but Mozart shows him helplessly locked in his rage—literally singing in circles as he returns to his mad music, like Elettra at the end of Idomeneo. Its fierce, protoBeethovenian obsessiveness comes back to disrupt the final number before the celebratory chorus. While Osmin is often described as part of the West’s fantasy of “the Other,” he also seems to embody (or exorcize?) something of the composer’s own rage over his humiliation by the Archbishop of Salzburg (the topic of that rage recurs with similarly obsessive frequency in Mozart’s letters from this period).
The transformations of Bretzner’s simpler libretto became even more prominent in the second and third acts. (Mozart’s score is divided into three acts, although, as in this production, Abduction is often performed as two acts with one full intermission.) New arias were added for Belmonte, Constanze, Blonde, and Osmin, and the action was reshaped to allow for moving ensembles (the quartet and the lovers’ duet) and for a different denouement. In Bretzner, Belmonte is revealed to be the son of Selim, making the Pasha’s pardon basically an automatic reaction. Abduction offers a twist that borrows from Enlightenment trendiness: Belmonte is actually the son of Selim’s nemesis, who caused him to abandon his Western identity and convert to a new life in Turkey. Selim concludes that it’s more satisfying to repress his instinctive desire for revenge and break the pattern, refusing to emulate the barbaric behavior that would doubtless have been his enemy’s choice
Mozart’s Pragmatic Art
Mozart offers us some precious glimpses into his workshop in the early stages of Abduction thanks to several letters to his father Leopold. These include the famously detailed explanations of his musical choices to depict the emotions in Osmin’s firstact aria and the Amajor aria for Belmonte that follows (beginning with the beautifully oboeaccented, brief recitative “Ach Constanze!” [“Oh Constanze!”]), which was the composer’s favorite number from the opera. Belmonte’s coloratura and sighing phrases reinforce the musical image of the anxious lovesickness that has motivated his pilgrimage. “One can see the trembling—faltering,” observes Mozart. “One can see his heaving breast—which is expressed by a crescendo.”
The composer delineates a nuanced view of music’s central role, which must nevertheless be tightly knit to the text and dramatic situation. What’s especially fascinating here is that Mozart’s inspiration remains so fluent while working within the pragmatic limits of a conventional and in fact clichéd story. The libretto is a classic instance of the ambivalent fascination of eighteenthcentury Europe with the Islamic world represented by the Ottoman Empire. This fascination took the form of a recurrent narrative in which adventurous rescuers allow their Western audience a tantalizing peek into an “exotic” fantasyland. Even the opera’s central musical cliché—the bright, quasimanic sound meant to connote “Turkish music” (and associated with the combined timbres of piccolo, cymbals, triangle, and bass drum)—becomes, in Mozart’s treatment, a device to help join together the variety of styles his score traverses. Similarly, Mozart develops rich and unique musical personas for his characters, yet he derives their vocal styles from a very practical sense of collaboration with the singers assigned to create the roles.
He was fortunate to have an exceptional cast at his command for the opera’s first production. Mozart prized the poignant tenor of Valentin Adamberger for his Belmonte, but he was especially thrilled to exploit the full and “beautiful deep tones” of his bass, Ludwig Fischer, which he used to fantastic comic effect when Osmin flies off the handle. The extreme agility, range, and theatrical charisma demanded by the role make Osmin among the most vivid as well as challenging of Mozart’s creations. On the other hand, Pasha Selim—his dramatic antithesis in the drama—remained only a spoken role at least in part on account of practical considerations (the extra numbers required to make this a proper singing role would have overloaded the already bulkedup opera). The contrast with Mozart’s musical characterizations is telling, but it also underlines a somewhat awkward disproportion between music and spoken dialogue, which the composer will overcome in his singspiel a decade later, Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute).
Abduction’s Tipping Point
In terms of musical presence, the counterweight to Osmin is of course Constanze, who becomes the central, most fully developed character in the score. Mozart admitted that he strayed a little from his artistic principles when he “sacrificed” Constanze’s first aria “to the flexible throat” of his agile soprano, Caterina Cavalieri—referring to a bit of gratuitous ornamentation. But he then put that agility to wonderfully apt use in the remarkable set of backtoback arias that occur at the center of Abduction. First comes the tragic pathos of opera seria in a Gminor lament, followed by the extravagance of “Martern aller Artern” (“Tortures past endurance”), which has the proportions of a concerto movement (and also showcases the painterly detail Mozart lavishes on the instrumental scoring of Abduction).
The play (and film) Amadeus portrays composer Antonio Salieri, a contemporary of Mozart’s, reacting sarcastically to this “greedy songbird” given to a display of “ghastly scales and arpeggios, whizzing up and down like fireworks at a fairground.” The Amadeus Salieri is just the first in a long line of listeners who fixate on the aria’s extremity of coloratura as either merely ostentatious—or perhaps a parody protesting rather too much (an approach that would make more sense in the Mozart of Così fan tutte or in Rossini). “Martern aller Arten” has become the emblem for the charge that Abduction itself is simply too rich, overstuffed with a perplexing diversity of styles—the “too many notes” of Joseph II’s infamous (and likely apocryphal) verdict on the opera.
But Mozart has clearly made Constanze the tipping point who transforms Abduction into something more than a singspiel of comic adventure. Thomas Baumann, a specialist on this work, offers a compelling reading of Constanze’s sequence of arias as dramatically integral. “The dark side of Selim’s complex personality has evoked, in the best traditions of opera, a strong new voice Constanze’s hitherto melancholic personality,” Baumann writes. He points out how Mozart charts her development into the resourceful character who figures in the two most sublime musical moments yet to come: the quartet that revolves around the Mozartean theme of forgiveness, and the final duet in which Constanze’s vision of serenity at last calms the anxious Belmonte. The pragmatic and worldly views espoused by their respective servants, Blonde and Pedrillo, meanwhile help to leaven the opera in its more serious second half. (Indeed, Mozart reported that the delightful drinking duet for Pedrillo and Osmin was the standout hit around town.) But they, too, are allowed to blend in the more refined sphere of their masters during the magic moment of the quartet.
That Mozart was wooing his own Constanze while creating the opera—they married, against his father’s wishes, just a few weeks after its premiere—was a parallel that led to a good deal of gossip among the Viennese wags. But like the opera, Mozart’s personal relationship—pursued at the cost of the familiar one with his father—helped define his mature self in this critical year. The constancy promised by the name of his lover and his opera heroine suggests another dimension to the Abduction project with which Mozart made a fresh start to his life in Vienna. Along with the obvious popularity of its topic, and even its political expediency (as propaganda for Joseph’s court), the theme of constancy would have held special relevance for Mozart during such an insecure period. In his book Mozart and the Enlightenment, Nicholas Till observes that “the story of the constant woman who remains steadfast while the hero roams the world in search of her provides both a promise of ultimate security, and confirmation of the uniqueness of the individual lover, for whom no substitute will suffice for the patiently waiting mistress.”
Abduction marked the composer’s greatest success in his own lifetime. It not only became an instant hit upon its premiere (July 16, 1782) but extended the mature Mozart’s name across Europe as a leading composer of the era, with productions mushrooming across Germany and beyond (for its staging in Bonn the following year, it’s intriguing to imagine that a teenaged Beethoven might have been engaged to play in the string section). All the more fitting since, like Shakespeare, Mozart was discovering in this opera a way to appeal across the spectrum: to connoisseurs, the court, and audiences just looking to enjoy some good tunes. The pressure of Vienna would continue to force him to work out this balance—which is, after all, the characteristic of the most universal artists.
High-definition video projection screens will be featured on the balcony level for this performance. 
