Mozart's first great German opera, Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio), the piece that made the composer's reputation with Viennese audiences at the beginning of the 1780s and which remained the most popular of his stage works during his short lifetime, throws down a host of challenges to modern sensibilities. Its themes of captivity, justice, retribution and forgiveness never become outdated, and neither, sadly, does the backdrop against which the drama is played out, that of cultural conflict and misunderstanding. This is a work - Mozart's contribution to a project to establish opera in German in a cultural milieu where Italian opera was the norm - that overflows with music in a way that can easily swamp the dialogue, as Emperor Joseph II is reputed to have spotted at the very outset ("Too many notes, my dear Mozart").
When the husband and wife team Karl-Ernst and Ursel Herrmann created this production for the Vienna Festival in 1989, they redressed the balance, not only focusing on the dialogue and, just as importantly, on wordless action as well, but also putting a prowling, tense and unhappy Selim, Hilmar Thate, a former member of the legendary Berliner Ensemble, at the very centre of the drama. For all the comedic aspects of the Pasha's household, represented by the buffoonish Osmin, the resentment and defensiveness that this speaking character conveys has a powerto match the depth of feeling that Mozait gives to the singing roles. And, strikingly, the emotional content of the orchestral introduction to Constanze's aria "Martern aller Arten" is identified as much with the captor as with the captive.
After his groundbreaking cycle of Monteverdi operas at the Zurich Opera House, Nikolaus Harnoncourt began to explore the Mozart operas there in 1980, before being invited to Vienna, where he conducted Idomeneo and Die Zauberflöte at the State Opera, followed by this Entfürung at the Theater an der Wien. The springy rhythms of the young Mozart’s "Turkish" style, with their exotic percussion accompaniment - here taken out of the pit and paraded on stage - are a gift to the conductor’s historically informed approach, but equally telling is the rhythmic fluidity of Constanze's great tragic arias, "Traurigkeit" and "Ach, ich liebte". These last words, ”Oh, I was in love", are the very ones that, intriguingly, Mozart's own Constanze copied out on the back of a letter the composer sent to his father in September 1781 to give him some examples of the music he was writing.
A largely young cast is headed by Kurt Streit, who has made a speciality of Mozart's demanding tenor roles, from Idomeneo to Tito. The character of Belmonte is seen here as an Enlightenment figure, a seeker about to encounter some difficult truths when he is reunited with his beloved Constanze, played by the Polish soprano Aga Winska. After appearing in Mozart (Le nozze di Figaro) and Verdi (Rigoletto) in Warsaw and Cracow, the young soprano was making her Vienna début in this role. Fellow Pole Elzbieta Szmytka, as her English maid Blonde, later graduated to the role of Constanze, while Wilfried Gahmlich had sung the role of Pedrillo in Harnoncourt's 1985 recording of the opera, and the tragic-comic role of Osmin is a staple of German bass Artur Korn's repertoire.
Drawing the whole together is Harnoncourt's responsive and dramatically driven musical direction. Kurt Streit has spoken admiringly of the conductor’s work with singers: "He has the gift of being able to bring out the best in you. He goes with the flow, yet he always has something to say." And the great quartet of discovery, doubt and reconciliation that bringsthe second act to a close proves the point: maintaining the essential clarity of texture, Harnoncourt charts a finely gauged sequence of tempos to convey the four characters' shifting feelings.