University of Hartford "H" Magazine - Winter 2019

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Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Mozart: Die Entführung aus dem Serail

09/10/2017 1:00 pm
09/10/2017 4:30 pm

 

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

No opera of Mozart's was so successful in his own lifetime. Immediately after its introduction at Vienna's Burgtheater in 1782 it took off for opera houses all over German-speaking Europe and beyond. "The Abduction from the Seraglio" is the finest specimen of a special subgenre of lyric theater in the eighteenth century: the "Turkish" opera. Sometimes comedic, sometimes melodramatic in nature, such operas were based upon a love story or tale of rescue and were set in some exotic location in the Near East. Every composer of any stature in Mozart's time tried his hand at Turkish opera. Over the years I've broadcast recordings of such works by Sammartini, Kraus, and Haydn.

Mozart's Turkish opera is also a Singspiel, an 18th century form of German musical comedy with spoken dialog. There are a lot of good recordings of "The Abduction" around. On Sunday, October 4, 1992 I broadcast a Sony Classical release of the Singspiel, recorded in 1991 in Vienna with Bruno Weil conducting the Vienna Symphony and chorus of the Vienna State Opera. That same year John Eliot Gardiner, the specialist in historically informed eighteenth century performance practice, recorded his own interpretation in London for Deutsche Grammophon's Archiv subsidiary. Gardiner led his own English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir. The Gardiner "Abduction" went over the air on Sunday, August 4, 2013. The British label L'Oiseau Lyre (a subdivision of Decca) came out with a recording of Die Entfuhrung in 1990. This also was a historically informed, period instrument interpretation. The late Christopher Hogwood, another pioneer in this field, directed the ensemble he founded, the Academy of Ancient Music. The L'Oiseau Lyre recording I broadcast almost exactly two years ago on Sunday, September 13, 2015.

Normally I would not feature this opera again so soon, but the French Harmonia Mundi label came out in 2015 with a "period" take on "The Abduction" that is so good it surpasses all those that have come before it. Rene Jacobs has given us a series of recordings of the Mozart operas which has opened people's ears to their full freshness and dramatic power. I have broadcast these HM releases as they have been received into our WWUH classical music record library. Jacobs directs the period instrument players of the Akademie fur Alte Musik Berlin and the Radio Berlin Chamber Choir. Among the assets of the Jacobs take on this Mozart opera are passages of the complete spoken word dialog and appropriate sound effects, plus an additional track of a Turkish march by Michael Haydn inserted into Act One just before the chorus of the Turkish Janissary soldiers.