On Tuesday, James Levine returned to the Met's podium to conduct Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. This was the first time I'd seen Mr. Levine since he announced his retirement last month. As usual, he was greeted by thunderous applause in a genuine display of affection as he moved to podium before the opening of the first act.
Die Entführung is technically not an opera at all but rather an example of singspiel, a German music hall tradition that is more of a spoken play with musical numbers interspersed among the dialog. Mozart was to revisit this genre at the end of his career in the masterpiece Die Zauberflöte. When he did, he no doubt had in mind the success he had enjoyed with this earlier work that had established him, only newly arrived in Vienna from Salzburg, as a major composer. It had also brought him to the attention of Joseph II, the liberal emperor and patron of the arts who had established the Nationalsingspiel in order to celebrate German culture and whose patronage was essential when Mozart later went on to compose the Da Ponte operas.
The libretto was completed by the Prussian Gottlieb Stephanie who had somehow managed to go from having been interned in Vienna as a prisoner of war to having been appointed director of the Nationalsingspiel. His work was not so much an adaptation of an earlier book by Christoph Friedrich Bretzner as an outright theft and none too good at that. Mozart complained in a letter to his father that "you are quite right so far as Stephanie's work is concerned. ... I am well aware that the verse is not of the best." Even under the best of circumstances it was never intended as anything more than a lighthearted crowd pleaser, but it still provided Mozart with a vehicle for some wonderful music that otherwise would not exist.
One of the more interesting aspects of Die Entführung is its fascination with Turkish culture, what Said would later refer to as "Orientalism." This was no idle curiosity on the part of the Viennese. The Battle of Vienna, fought almost exactly one hundred years before in 1683, had marked a turning point in European history when the Turks, then at the height of their power, had been defeated by forces of the Holy Roman Empire. The Turkish setting provided Mozart the opportunity to indulge in so called "Turkish music" lightly based on the actual music of Janissary bands. There was no real authenticity in Mozart's attempts, of course, but he did include in his instrumentation the triangle, bass drum and cymbals which were not then standard in Western orchestras.
The performance on Tuesday evening was excellent. Mr. Levine has always been one of the foremost interpreters of Mozart's music. It was he who in 1979 brought Die Entführung back into the Met's repertoire after an absence of more than thirty years and opera lovers owe him a great vote of thanks for having done so. This is a seriously underrated work. While it may not rise to the level of the Da Ponte operas, it is nevertheless a mature work in which Mozart fully demonstrated his skill as an operatic composer. This is nowhere so evident as in the second act when Mozart gives to Konstanze the thrilling arias Traurigkeit ward mir zum Lose and Martern aller Arten one after the other.
Despite all the controversy that has arisen in the wake of Mr. Levine's announced retirement as Music Director, his conducting - at least from the listener's point of view - remains as impeccable as ever. Mozart's music has always been one of Mr. Levine's specialties, and it was a privilege to once again hear his interpretation of this work.
I had not been familiar with the Tuesday evening's cast, but coloratura soprano Albina Shagimuratova did full justice to the role of Konstanze while soprano Kathleen Kim was highly effective as Blondchen. As usual, the role of Osmin, here ably played by bass Hans-Peter König, was a show stealer in providing comic relief.
The production by the late John Dexter appeared more worn than ever after all these years. Surely such an important work merits a new production by now.
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