Die Entführung aus dem Serail

• 1. Introduction

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  Die Entführung aus dem Serail opened at the Vienna Burgtheater on the 16th of July 1782, with its twenty-six-year-old composer on the podium. The first two performances alone brought in 1,200 florins. That opening night set off a chain of consequences nobody predicted: a fight over stolen libretto credit, a legendary exchange with an emperor, and a reckoning from Goethe himself about what Mozart had done to the German-language stage. How did a singspiel about kidnapped women and a merciful Turkish pasha become the breakout triumph of Mozart's Vienna career? And why does the man who paid a flat fee of 100 ducats for it still haunt the opera house three centuries later?

• 2. The World It Came From

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  North African Barbary corsairs had spent generations terrorizing Christian shipping in the western Mediterranean, hijacking vessels, seizing cargo, and most profitably, kidnapping passengers and crew to sell into slavery or ransom back to their families. The corsairs operated with the backing, or at least the tacit approval, of local Muslim rulers in Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. Their activities only finally ended after the French conquest of Algiers in 1830.

  Out of that anxious European awareness of the Ottoman world came a fashion for what the eighteenth century called the exotic East. Austria itself had only recently stopped fearing Turkish military expansion. Mozart's opera plays directly into that moment of relief and curiosity, giving its Viennese audience a Westernized Turkish color: the rattling percussion of Janissary band music, rendered through a bass drum called the tamburo grande, cymbals, triangles, and piccolo added to the standard Classical orchestra.

  The Pasha in the plot is a study in contradictions. His overseer Osmin is played for laughs as a send-up of stereotypes about Turkish despotism. Yet the opera's climax turns that stereotype on its head entirely. When Belmonte reveals his parentage, it turns out his father is the Pasha's personal enemy. The Pasha's response is not vengeance but a deliberate act of forgiveness, releasing all four captives and refusing the ransom.

• 3. A Commission Pursued

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  When Mozart arrived in Vienna in 1781 at the age of twenty-five, he was not yet the established figure the city would come to know. He set about making himself known through deliberate social cultivation. He brought a copy of his earlier unfinished opera Zaide to Gottlieb Stephanie, the inspector of the Nationalsingspiel, and showed it to him as proof of his abilities.

  Mozart also played excerpts from his opera Idomeneo at the home of his friend and patroness Maria Wilhelmine Thun, in front of the theater's manager Count Franz Xaver Orsini-Rosenberg. Idomeneo had premiered with considerable success in Munich the year before, and the Count was impressed. With those two endorsements in hand, Mozart secured the agreement that Stephanie would prepare a libretto for him.

  The Nationalsingspiel itself was a project of Emperor Joseph II, founded in 1778 to promote opera in the German language rather than the Italian style then dominant in Vienna. It ran until 1783, ultimately judged a failure, though it produced a number of translated successes along the way. Mozart's opera stood as its single outstanding original triumph.

  Stephanie's solution for the libretto was to adapt an existing work by Christoph Friedrich Bretzner: Belmont und Constanze, oder Die Entführung aus dem Serail. He made the adaptation without crediting Bretzner or seeking his permission. Bretzner later protested the theft loudly and in public.

• 4. Mozart Shapes His Own Opera

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  Stephanie delivered the libretto to Mozart on the 29th of July 1781. Mozart threw himself into it immediately, finishing three major numbers in just two days. A letter to his father Leopold from that period shows he was exhilarated by the prospect of a Vienna premiere.

  The original schedule called for the opera to be ready within two months, because tentative plans had been made to perform it during the September visit of the Russian Grand Duke Paul, son of Catherine the Great and heir to the Russian throne. When organizers decided to stage operas by Gluck instead, Mozart gained the extra time he needed.

  He used that time to push Stephanie hard. In a letter to his father dated the 13th of October 1781, Mozart argued that in opera, poetry must be "altogether the obedient daughter of the music," and that the best result comes when a talented composer meets what he called "that true phoenix": an able poet. By the 26th of September he was already reporting that he had halted composition on Act 3 because he wanted a quintet moved from the opening of that act to the close of Act 2, which required an entirely new plot mechanism. He waited, not without some irritation, for Stephanie to work through his other commitments.

  Mozart was candid that he had no illusions about Stephanie as a person. He acknowledged that Stephanie might only be friendly to his face. What mattered was that Stephanie was preparing the libretto exactly as Mozart wanted it. The premiere finally arrived on the 16th of July 1782.

• 5. The Singers and the Score

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  Mozart wrote these roles knowing exactly who would sing them, and he tailored each part to the individual voice. The first Osmin was Ludwig Fischer, a bass celebrated for his unusually wide range and his ability to leap cleanly across large intervals. Osmin's Act 3 aria "O, wie will ich triumphieren" descends twice to a low D, one of the lowest notes demanded of any voice in the entire operatic repertoire.

  For the first Konstanze, Caterina Cavalieri, Mozart was equally specific in his calculations. He wrote to his father that he had sacrificed Konstanze's aria "a little to the flexible throat of Mlle. Cavalieri." The aria he had in mind was "Martern aller Arten," known for an unusually long orchestral introduction that unfolds before Konstanze sings a single note, and for a passage in which she performs in a kind of sinfonia concertante with four solo players drawn from the pit.

  The premiere cast also included Valentin Adamberger as Belmonte, Therese Teyber as Blonde, Johann Ernst Dauer as Pedrillo, and Dominik Jautz in the spoken role of Pasha Selim. The orchestra included several notable figures: cellist Joseph Franz Weigl, oboist Josef Triebensee, and the clarinet-playing brothers Anton and Johann Stadler. The first violins included Franz de Paula Hofer, who would later become Mozart's brother-in-law. The four musicians recruited to play the Turkish percussion instruments were organized by a Franz Tyron, Kapellmeister of the Austrian Second Field Artillery Regiment, though their individual names were never recorded.

• 6. The Price of a Triumph

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  By any measure of public enthusiasm, Die Entführung was a runaway success. It was performed repeatedly in Vienna during Mozart's lifetime and spread quickly through German-speaking Europe. In 1787, Goethe wrote that all his own careful work as a librettist had been simply swept aside: Die Entführung aus dem Serail, he said, "conquered all," and his own carefully written piece was never so much as mentioned in theater circles again.

  For Mozart personally, the financial picture was far bleaker. He received a flat fee of 100 Imperial ducats, equivalent to roughly 450 florins, and earned nothing further from the many subsequent performances. The opera's success raised his standing with the public but did not translate into lasting income.

  The opera reached Paris in November 1801, when Frédéric Blasius conducted Ellmenreich's company in performances at the Théâtre de la Gaîté. The American premiere in English was given by the Rochester Opera Company on the 1st of November 1926, directed by Vladimir Rosing. A second production with a new English libretto by Robert A. Simon followed on the 31st of January 1928, presented by the American Opera Company at the Gallo Opera House in New York, and then toured to Boston and Chicago.

• 7. The Emperor's Complaint

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  The most quoted story about Die Entführung comes from the early Mozart biography by Franz Xaver Niemetschek, published in 1798. In the version most widely repeated, Emperor Joseph II heard the opera and told Mozart: "That is too fine for my ears. There are too many notes." Mozart is said to have replied: "There are just as many notes as there should be."

  Scholars have questioned both the accuracy of this anecdote and the translation on which the English-language version depends. The original German reads: "Zu schön für unsere Ohren, und gewaltig viel Noten, lieber Mozart!" The phrase "gewaltig viel Noten" does not straightforwardly mean "too many notes." The scholar Mautner, translating Niemetschek, renders it as "an extraordinary number of notes." Branscombe translates it simply as "very many notes." William Stafford offers: "Too beautiful for our ears, and an enormous number of notes, dear Mozart!"

  Some scholars argue that the popular version of the anecdote has unfairly burdened the Emperor with a reputation for musical obtuseness and for underappreciating Mozart, neither of which is fully supported by the historical record. What is undeniable is that Goethe's testimony points toward the same reality the anecdote tries to capture: the sheer density and ambition of Mozart's score left even sophisticated listeners uncertain how to respond. The American post-modernist writer Donald Barthelme found that ambiguity productive enough to build a surreal short story around in The New Yorker in January 1978, recasting Belmonte as a cowboy sculptor, the Pasha as a Plymouth automobile dealer worth five million dollars a year, and letting Constanze choose to stay.