Bard Music Festival Presents
Program Eleven • “Too beautiful”: Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio
3:00 pm – 4:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Mozart was commissioned to write The Abduction from the Seraglio (“Die Entführung aus dem Serail”) by Joseph II, who hoped to promote a German-language National Singspiel to rival Italian opera. An immediate success at its premiere, the work established Mozart’s reputation and remained one of the greatest successes of his career. The Abduction is the story of a Spanish nobleman and his fiancée. She and their two servants have been kidnapped by pirates and sold into the harem of a Turkish Pasha. Using intrigue and disguises to outwit their overseer, the lovers plot an escape. However, it is only when the pasha reveals unexpected nobility, choosing mercy over revenge, that the four regain their freedom. This story reflects the fascination that Turkey held for Mozart and his Viennese contemporaries, for whom the Ottoman Empire was not only a key cultural influence but also—in the long shadow of the Ottoman–Habsburg wars—a remembered military threat. Imagining the Ottoman world through Western eyes, the work is imbued with Orientalism, from Mozart’s approximation of Turkish music, loosely based on that of the famous Janissary marching bands, to exoticized characters like the buffoonishly brutal overseer. Yet the opera also complicates such stereotypes: the pasha’s final act of clemency gave Viennese audiences an Enlightenment lesson, presenting virtue as a universal trait and using the imagined East to critique Western cruelty. With its emphasis on historical scholarship and ability to provide a “rich web of context” (The New York Times), Bard is uniquely well-placed to explore these contradictions, when Botstein, the ASO, and the Bard Festival Chorale take part in a semi-staged concert performance of the opera. This forms Program Eleven, “Too beautiful”*: Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio, which draws the Bard Music Festival—and all seven weeks of Bard SummerScape—to a gripping close.
For more information, call 845-758-7900, e-mail [email protected],
or visit https://fishercenter.bard.edu/events/bmf26-p11/.
Time: 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Location: Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater
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