Glyndebourne

Die Entführung aus dem Serail

Mozart
This performance is no longer viewable as video-on-demand for rights reasons but other material about the production is still available.

With the help of their lovers, Konstanze and her maid plot their escape from Pasha Selim’s harem. But when their plans are betrayed and punishment looms, help comes from an unlikely quarter.

Mozart’s first Viennese opera boasts some of his most spectacularly virtuosic vocal music, especially for the heroine Konstanze. David McVicar’s hedonistic culture-clash comedy sets Die Entführung aus dem Serail in an 18th-century Eastern fantasy of sun-filled gardens and cool, shady terraces.

Cast

Konstanze
Sally Matthews
Belmonte
Edgaras Montvidas
Osmin
Tobias Kehrer
Pedrillo
Brenden Gunnell
Blonde
Mari Eriksmoen
Pasha Selim
Franck Saurel
Klaas
Jonas Cradock
Chorus
The Glyndebourne Chorus
Orchestra
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
...
Music
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Conductor
Robin Ticciati
Director
David McVicar
Lighting
Paule Constable
Text
Christoph Friedrich Bretzner
Chorus Master
Jeremy Bines
Orchestra leader
Kati Debretzeni
...

Video

Extract

O, wie will ich triumphieren

Act III. Late at night, Konstanze and Belmonte make for the harbour. When Pedrillo tries to rescue Blonde, Osmin (Tobias Kehrer) suddenly discovers them. Guards drag Belmonte and Konstanze before him and Osmin gloats in bloodthirsty triumph. Conducted by Robin Ticciati and directed by David McVicar.

Read lessRead more
Extract

Martern aller Arten

Act II. Konstanze’s (Sally Matthews) refusal to love the Pasha angers him, yet her defiance confounds him once more. Conducted by Robin Ticciati and directed by David McVicar.

Read lessRead more

The story

The young Spanish noblewoman Konstanze has been abducted by pirates together with her English maid Blonde, and Pedrillo, her betrothed Belmonte’s valet. Landing on the shores of Turkey, they have been sold as slaves to Pasha Selim. Pedrillo has smuggled letters out to his master and Belmonte has sailed from Spain to try to rescue them.

Act I

Finding himself outside the country house of the Pasha, Belmonte encounters the surly overseer Osmin, who chases him off. Pedrillo is in love with Blonde, who has become Osmin’s slave. When Pedrillo spots his master, he quickly concocts a plan to gain Belmonte admission to the palace. Belmonte is horrified that the Pasha seeks to make Konstanze one of his wives.

The Pasha arrives with Konstanze. He assures her that he will never seek to force her love, but is hurt and angry when she confesses her love for Belmonte. He gives her one day to reconsider. Pedrillo introduces Belmonte to the Pasha as an architect. Selim invites him to stay. Osmin tries to bar their way, but the two men push him aside and enter the palace grounds.
 
Act II
 
Blonde does her best to keep the amorous Osmin at bay. To his frustration, she refuses to accept her condition of slavery. Konstanze’s refusal to love the Pasha angers him, yet her defiance confounds him once more.

Pedrillo tells Blonde about the escape plans. Overjoyed, she rushes off to tell her mistress. Pedrillo drugs some wine to put Osmin to sleep. The sleeping draught soon takes effect and Osmin is safely put out of the way. In the utmost secrecy, the lovers finally reunite and discuss their plans of escape.
 
Act III

Late at night, Konstanze and Belmonte make for the harbour. When Pedrillo tries to rescue Blonde, Osmin suddenly discovers them. Guards drag Belmonte and Konstanze before him and Osmin gloats in bloodthirsty triumph. The Pasha is roused by the alarm. Belmonte reveals his identity and offers to pay a ransom; his family is wealthy and noble. Selim recognises Belmonte as the son of his sworn enemy, who once drove him from his homeland. He leaves to consider his revenge.

Belmonte and Konstanze resolve to die with courage together. Selim returns and delivers his judgement. He will not stoop to the level of Belmonte’s father. All four are given their freedom and he renounces his claim on Konstanze. Osmin rushes away in a rage. The mercy and humanity of the Pasha are praised and the lovers leave.

Insights

Die Entführung aus dem Serail – A German opera alla turca

Mozart’s first serious German opera is, in fact, a Turkish one. Die Entführung aus dem Serail is a tricky affair to stage nowadays, seeing how it imagines the East through the prism of Western sensibilities. How, for instance, should the Ottoman court be presented? How its ruler Pasha Selim? The portrayal of the callous overseer Osmin poses particular difficulties if one wants to avoid the essentialising stereotype of Turkish despotism. Director David McVicar paradoxically progressive solution consists in setting the plot in its own time and complying with the opera’s musical and textual cues. Its own time is, of course, the 18th century.

The opera premiered on 16 July 1782 at the Vienna Burgtheater, conducted by the composer. It was commissioned by Emperor Joseph II, who aimed to create a national Singspiel as a counterpart to the Italian-influenced court opera. It is considered one of the first original operas in the German language. Immediately a great success, Die Entführung aus dem Serail established Mozart, who had moved from Salzburg a year earlier, in Vienna.

The work is imbued with 18th-century Western orientalism evoked in immaculate detail by Vicki Mortimer’s elaborate set designs. Conjuring up the palace, its gardens and the harem’s atmosphere, they capture the lure of the Ottoman Empire. Mozart further sets the scene by employing ‘Turkish’ music. The overture and several arias allude to oriental themes, as it was probably imagined at the time. The addition of instruments such as cymbals, bass drum or ‘Turkish drum’, piccolo flute and triangle to the orchestra of the Viennese Classical period corresponds to the instruments of janissary music.

Using these ‘Turkish’ musical elements to depict Osmin’s ire, for example, is shorthand for identifying him as an ‘Other’. Enlightenment opera-goers would easily feel an air of superiority towards him. The way Osmin gloats at the idea of torture contrasts starkly with the newly adopted rational values promoted at the time - Emperor Joseph II had just banned torture and the death penalty in 1781. Osmin corresponds to the stereotype of the oriental man: brutish and lewd. His attempts to force Blonde to love him backfire with her ridiculing him.

Pasha Selim’s portrayal, on the other hand, jars with the simplistic image of the ‘barbaric Turk’. Although he owns a harem and slaves, fulfilling the criteria for the cliché of the Eastern despot, his characterisation is nuanced. As a speaking part, Selim stands out from the other roles. Is music beyond his reach? Or is he all the nobler for not singing? When the Pasha falls in love with Konstanze, who refuses his advances, he at first threatens her. Faced with her constancy, he tries winning her heart through - Western? - reason. It is no coincidence that the female protagonist bears the name of Mozart’s later wife Konstanze. Selim’s violent tendencies abate in contact with a Western woman. She, he promises to love alone, renouncing his harem. When he is ultimately betrayed, he selflessly renounces the exercise of his power and sets the Westerners free. When in the last act, we find out that the Turkish ruler is, in fact, a renegade, who has been deprived of his Western existence and forced into his Ottoman exile through the intrigues of Belmonte's father, the clear-cut opposition between East and West is irredeemably broken. 

Despite appearances, no straightforward polarity between East and West can be found in the way love is depicted in Die Entführung aus dem Serail. When Belmonte and Pedrillo meet their lovers before being captured again, they ask them whether they have been faithful, conscious that they might have succumbed to oriental charms. This trope of the sexually appealing Eastern man also appears in Così fan tutte. Ferrando and Guglielmo, disguised as Albanians, introduce themselves to their fiancées and find to their despair that the women are more intrigued than they had hoped.

What was the appeal of such exoticism in opera? And what warrants still staging it today? While many reasons might explain the choice of an oriental subject matter, not least of which the popularity of ‘Turkish’ music in Vienna at the time, not all of them are reprehensible. The Eastern context, even as it reduced certain roles and relationships into stereotypes, can at the same time be understood as deceit to universalise, even mythologise human conduct. While Osmin is undoubtedly a demeaning representation of the oriental man, as a comic character he nonetheless shares traits with your run-of-the-mill Western buffoon. The fact that Pasha Selim can be read as the epitome of ideal human behaviour is more astonishing. Perhaps his liminal position between East and West eluding classification establishes him as a rare universal figure.