Overture to The Abduction from the Seraglio, K.384
Joannes Chrisostomus Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart, who began calling himself Wolfgango Amadeo around 1770 during his first trip to Italy and switched to Wolfgang Amadè in 1777, but who never used Amadeus except in jest, was born in Salzburg, Austria, on January 27, 1756, and died in Vienna on December 5, 1791. He composed the Singspiel Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) between the summer of 1781 (he finished the first act in August) and the late spring of 1782. The entire score was finished by May, and the premiere took place on July 16. It was Mozart’s customary practice to write the overture last.
The score for Overture to The Abduction from the Seraglio calls for an orchestra of piccolo (alternating in the slow section with flute), 2 each of oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets, and timpani, “Janissary (Turkish) music” consisting of triangle, cymbals, and bass drum; and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
Mozart’s first stage work for Vienna was not an Italian opera but a German Singspiel, a “sung-play,” in which the music may have had the most important part, but which also had a considerable amount of spoken dialogue. This was in fact the conventional way of presenting comic opera in German (whereas the Italians wanted to have all the dialogue set to music, and so Mozart resorted to the conversational, rapidly moving “recitativo secco” for works in Italian, i.e., The Marriage of Figaro, Così fan tutte, and Don Giovanni). The plot had been used just a year before for an opera in Berlin entitled Belmont and Constanze, with music by Johann André and words by one Bretzner. After Mozart’s opera appeared, this Bretzner was immortalized (in a small way) by publicly attacking “a certain person by the name of Mozart” who had been so impertinent as to “misuse” his drama for an opera text.
Two factors, aside from the inherent fun of the libretto itself, probably induced Mozart to accept this particular libretto. The first was the passion for all things “Turkish” in Vienna, and indeed in Europe. It had been nearly a century since the Turkish siege of Vienna, but Islamic culture was still utterly exotic and foreign to Europeans. Distasteful, stereotypical tropes abound in the plot of Abduction from the Seraglio: Turks had numerous wives kept in seraglios (or harems), they were brutal, uncultured, and bloodthirsty, and they were forbidden to drink alcohol. Musically, they used high-pitched melody instruments and a lot of clanging percussion (the Janissary component of Mozart’s orchestra).
The second reason Mozart may have chosen this libretto is the name of the heroine, Constanze, for at precisely this time the composer was falling in love with Constanze Weber while firmly assuring his father off in Salzburg that he was remaining independent and heartfree. To write music expressing the ardent love of Belmonte for his lost Constanze (who, before the certain rises, has been captured by Turkish pirates at sea and transferred to the harem of Pascha Selim) must have been almost second nature to Mozart in the circumstances. His state of mind can be imagined from his report to his father that the title of the new opera would be Bellmont und Konstanze, oder Die Verfuhrung aus dem Serail (Bellmont and Konstanze, or The Seduction from the Seraglio)!
In any case, Mozart began composing in anticipation of a fall 1781 production. When it was postponed, he set the work aside for some months, returning to it in the spring of 1782. He completed it sometime in May, and rehearsals began in June. By this time Mozart was firmly committed to marrying Constanze (if only because her mother accused him of an intimacy that could require him to marry her or pay financial damages), though he had still not mentioned the fact to his father, other than to suggest obliquely that he could use a woman’s organizing skills around the house and arguing that two could live more cheaply than one.
Mozart copied out the theme of the first fourteen measures of the overture and included them in a letter to his father with the comment, “It is very short, with alternate fortes and pianos, and the Turkish music always coming in at the fortes.” This “Turkish music” consists of triangle, cymbals, and bass drum, plus the piccolo for melodic purposes. It was loud and effective, by 18th-century standards. Mozart summarized the Presto section for his father: “The overture modulates through different keys, and I doubt whether anyone, even though his previous night has been a sleepless one, could go to sleep over it.”
The opening Presto comes to a full stop in the dominant key of G. What follows is somewhat old-fashioned by the standards of Mozart overtures—a throwback to the old Italian opera overture with its fast-slow-fast pattern. A new theme appears, Andante, in C minor in the violins, repeated at once in E-flat on the oboe. First-time listeners have no way of knowing that this is actually a reference to the opera’s opening aria, in which Belmont sings, “Is this where I shall see you? Constanze, my joy!” It makes, in any case, a striking contrast—“European” music as opposed to “Turkish” music. The Presto returns in the manner of a recapitulation.
In the opera house, Mozart makes the overture run directly into the first act, so that Belmont’s aria becomes almost a formal recapitulation of the slow section in the overture. But for concert purposes the overture was provided with a close comprising almost half of the second Presto section. This was composed by the music publisher Johann Anton André, the son of the composer of the earlier Belmont and Constanze whose librettist had accused Mozart of “misusing” his work!
Steven Ledbetter
Steven Ledbetter, a freelance writer and lecturer on music, was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1998.
The first Boston Symphony Orchestra performances of the Overture to The Abduction from the Seraglio took place in December 1882, under Georg Henschel's direction, in Providence and Boston.
