On Stage, Muslims, Christians and Mozart
When the curtain goes up on Mozart’s “Die Entführung aus dem Serail” (“The Abduction From the Seraglio”), we are on the Mediterranean coast in the Ottoman Empire, at a palace where European captives are being held as slaves by a Muslim pasha. When the Ottoman Turkish overseer, Osmin, enters and sings about his rage against the Christian prisoners, he fantasizes about hanging them, impaling them and beheading them.
Mozart and his librettists wrote a comedy. But it is hard to listen to Osmin’s aria today and not think about contemporary nightmare scenarios of hostages and global conflict. An evening with “Abduction From the Seraglio” — now at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, it was first presented in Vienna in 1782 — reminds us that in the 18th century, when the Ottoman Empire was governed by the Turkish sultans in Istanbul, Mozart was one of many composers fascinated by the relations, encounters and conflicts between Christians and Muslims.
“Abduction” may be an opera for our own times, too: an intriguing if disturbing model of how to understand — through the structure of music — the anger of an enemy and how to explore the reconciliation of cultural difference.
The holding of Europeans in the Muslim world was a common occurrence in Mozart’s time. Alongside the Atlantic slave trade, there was a Mediterranean slave trade, driven by the Barbary pirates of North Africa who operated within the domain of influence of the Ottoman Empire. Religious and philanthropic associations were active all over Europe, raising money for ransoms, and publishers hawked both moving memoirs of female captivity and, later, pornographic fictions on the same theme.
Sex trafficking is, of course, not what one usually thinks about when listening to Mozart’s brilliant overture. But female slavery, however evasively dramatized in this comedic presentation, forms the back story of “Abduction,” in which Konstanze, a Spanish lady, and her English servant Blonde have been kidnapped by pirates and sold to Pasha Selim.
At the same time that Mediterranean piracy was an 18th- century reality, operas about Turks were a cultural phenomenon, with hundreds of productions featuring turbaned sultans and pashas enslaving hundreds of sopranos in their harems. In 1683, just shy of a century before the premiere of “Abduction,” the Viennese withstood a Turkish siege. Ottoman military bands played authentic Turkish percussion to terrify the residents — the same percussion that Mozart later imitated for its entertainment value in “Abduction.”
The siege was broken with the arrival of a Polish army, and the ensuing victories of the allied Christian troops pushed back the borders of the Ottoman Empire. This made the Turkish military seem less fearsome than before, and European opera houses rather suddenly began staging operas about Turks.
Handel’s “Tamerlano” was produced in London and portrayed with deep sympathy the defeated Ottoman sultan Bajazet, whose heroic sufferings as a captive of the conqueror Tamerlane were a common operatic subject throughout the 18th century. Grétry’s “Caravan of Cairo” was such a huge success in Paris in the 1780s that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York preserves French fabric samples printed with scenes from the work.
In “Abduction,” Osmin, the pasha’s overseer and the guardian of the harem, dominates with extravagant rages that reach down to the depths of the bass vocal range. Mozart was invested in exploring through this character the ways that music could express extreme emotions while still remaining musical: “Passions violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of disgust, and music must never of- fend the ear,” he wrote in a 1781 letter.
While Mozart lived in a century of intermittent European wars against the Ottoman Turks, as well as a century of captivity and slave trade on the Mediterranean, he couldn’t help being interested in exploring the ways in which the two sides were closer than they realized. Belmonte, the tenor hero, seeks to rescue (or “abduct”) Konstanze from the pasha’s harem, but when they are caught escaping, the pasha turns out to be a “generous Turk” in the 18th- century tradition. The lovers are neither beheaded, nor hanged, nor impaled, but are set free to return to Europe and love each other. When the European captive Pedrillo offers alcoholic temptation, and once the Quranic prohibition has been considered and discarded, Osmin, the angry overseer, becomes entirely amiable, joining Pedrillo in a tribute to Bacchus and a toast to all women, blondes and brunettes alike.
In the spirit of the Enlightenment, and within the genre of comic opera, Mozart could imagine a brotherhood of Christians and Muslims. After all, even in an age of violent conflicts, harmony was what he understood best.