by Rafaël Newman
Not quite 25 years ago, on September 15, 2001, I took my six-year-old daughter to the opera. Her mother had arranged the outing, in part because it was clear how much Hella was beginning to enjoy musical theater—a pleasure I had learned from my own parents—and in part because, in the final weeks of her pregnancy with our second child, Caroline simply needed a few hours to herself.
The tickets to that evening’s performance of Die Entführung aus dem Serail at Opernhaus Zürich had been purchased at some point during the summer of 2001, well before September 11. By the time Hella and I attended the production, four days after what would soon come to be known as 9/11, everything had changed; and Mozart’s 1782 opera, which mainly concerns two pairs of lovers escaping from danger but also stages a confrontation between the Christian and Muslim worlds, had taken on a new, more urgent aspect.
When, therefore, the Swiss actor Peter Arens, in the speaking role of Bassa Selim, a convert to Islam and an Ottoman despot, made his celebrated final-act speech extolling clemency, in Zurich on September 15, 2001, he spoke directly to the audience rather than to the onstage character he was meant to be addressing. [E]s wäre ein weit grösser Vergnügen eine erlittene Ungerechtigkeit durch Wohlthaten zu vergelten, als Laster mit Lastern tilgen, Arens said as Selim: “It is a far greater pleasure to repay injustices suffered by good deeds than to compensate evil by more evil”, ostensibly renouncing vengeance on the son of his enemy and allowing him to return to Spain with the woman they both love, but in fact making an unmistakable plea for moderation in the American military campaign against Afghanistan that was gearing up that very moment. To amplify the point, in both 1782 and 2001, the four lovers respond with a quartet: “Nothing is as ugly as vengeance.”
In the event, of course, Selim’s/Arens’s implicit plea, and others more overt, in the international press and on the street, went unheard in Washington. What is more, when the US President’s thirst for revenge was ultimately unslaked in Afghanistan, George Bush Jr. would go on, in 2003, to resume and extend his father’s earlier war on Iraq with a trumped-up mission to find and destroy non-existent WMDs there. There ensued a Second Gulf War that lasted for eight years, until 2011, when US troops were withdrawn from Iraq.
The opera’s effect on me, however—in particular the effect of Peter Arens’s portentous breaking of the fourth wall in Act 3—was immediate, and lasting. It felt that evening as if we were living in History, my young daughter and I: as if the forces at work in the great world, which would normally bypass placid Switzerland, had been rerouted to run directly through the Zurich Opera House. As if the next move to be made by the US military might have consequences not only for the soldiers involved, or their targets abroad, but for all of us on earth—as of course it did and still does: dire consequences. As if an actor speaking lines from a libretto written over 200 years earlier might in fact alter the course of contemporary human affairs.
So when I was asked earlier this year to collaborate on a production of The Abduction from the Seraglio, as the opera is known in English, at the Bard Music Festival in upstate New York, I agreed at once. My job, as dramaturg and translator, would be to create a new English version of the work’s extensive spoken dialogue and to advise the production’s stage director, Marco Nisticò, on the cuts necessary to reduce the Seraglio’s unwieldy volume of text, rife with stage business and musty ribaldry, and thus ensure an acceptable running time. The opera’s arias, duets, trios, and quartets would, needless to say, be sung in the original German, and in their entirety.
There was also a further, more political dimension to my brief. The Seraglio, once one of Mozart’s most popular operas and the first to receive widespread acclaim during his lifetime, is no longer produced as often, particularly in the English-speaking world, since its plot depends on explicitly racist—what would now be called Islamophobic—stereotypes. My job, therefore, as I understood it from my initial meetings with Nisticò and other members of Bard’s faculty and festival administration, would include toning down some of the 1782 libretto’s more flagrantly “incorrect” excesses without, for all that, sacrificing any crucial elements of the story.
The plot of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, a reworking by Johann Gottlieb Stephanie (1741-1800) of an earlier libretto by Christoph Friedrich Bretzner (1748-1807), is as follows. Konstanze, a Spanish noblewoman, along with her lady’s maid Blondchen and the latter’s lover Pedrillo, a valet, has been kidnapped by pirates and is being held captive by Bassa Selim, an Ottoman pasha. Selim, himself a renegade convert to Islam, has fallen in love with Konstanze, and has been attempting, in a campaign of seduction combined with threats, to win her heart. Blondchen, meanwhile, is subject to the same attentions on the part of Osmin, Selim’s harem keeper. As the opera begins, Belmonte, Konstanze’s true love, has arrived under cover from Spain with the intention of rescuing his compatriots from the pasha’s clutches. This he does eventually manage, with Pedrillo’s connivance—almost: for the escapees are apprehended before they can embark on Belmonte’s rescue ship. The quartet fear the direst punishments at the hands of Selim, who has also learned that Belmonte is the son of his arch-nemesis; but in the opera’s finale they are delighted when the Turkish grandee decides instead to pardon them and allow them to return home, championing clemency over vengeance:
Take your liberty, sail back to your fatherland and tell your sire that you were in my power and that I set you free, so that he may know how much greater is my pleasure at repaying the injustice I suffered at his hands with kindness, than to answer vice with vice.
This was the very speech that had so moved me a quarter of a century later, when spoken from the stage of Opernhaus Zürich in German; I reproduce it here, in my own translation, with a special pleasure, and a particular frisson.
And that speech, in my English rendering, did indeed make it more or less intact onto the stage at Fisher Center last month, when the 36th annual Bard Music Festival featured its new production of the Seraglio under the stage direction of Marco Nisticò, with the American Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leon Botstein, music director and Bard’s long-time President.
Much of the rest of my translation of the opera’s dialogue, however—some 7,000 words in total—did not make the cut. (The Seraglio is a so-called singspiel, a mixture of sung and spoken text, an early forerunner of the modern musical and a departure from the half-sung recitative of the Baroque era.) In a series of Zoom meetings and email exchanges, Marco and I gradually reduced my manuscript rendering of Acts 1, 2, and 3 by more than a third, with further cuts made by Marco and his cast when the opera went into rehearsal.
On the whole, these excisions were reflective more of Marco’s need to streamline the dialogue’s bulk than of his obeisance to the dictates of the zeitgeist, as embattled as that last is in the contemporary United States. We cut a few mentions of “barbarians” (although one of these is made by the Ottoman pasha himself, of Belmonte’s Christian father) and of “slaves,” in deference to a particularly American sensibility; a great deal more Bowdlerizing was not necessary.
Because in fact, Stephanie’s libretto is not actually riddled with racist epithets. If anything, it is gender politics that the opera more centrally—and, for a contemporary audience, more problematically—deploys: Blondchen schools her would-be lover Osmin in the culture of (heterosexual) seduction while rewarding Pedrillo with erotic favors; Konstanze declares ecstatically that she would rather suffer death by torture than be unfaithful to Belmonte; and nevertheless, when the two couples are reunited, the women must endure a tiresome interrogation before their lovers are convinced of their chastity. All of this, of course, underpinned by a conventional (or imagined) understanding of sexual mores in the characters’ respective cultures.
But while it is undeniable that the Seraglio is animated by a Eurocentric perspective and Orientalist stereotypes, the caricature of Islamic absolutism drawn in the character of Osmin is weighed and found wanting against a Christian humanism represented by—his master, the Ottoman pasha Selim, who foreswears the ostensible cruelty of his adopted faith to perform a consummately “Western” act of charity and forgiveness. And the opera’s Christian characters—the quartet of European lovers, from Spain or, in the case of Blondchen, from England—are effectively passive pawns between these two equally “exoticized” ethical poles; their “noble” if ultimately foiled escape from the clutches of the ravening “Turks” is the occasion for buffoonery and slapstick rather than the triumph of civilization over barbarism.
The only scene in which Islam is thematized with relevance to the dramatic action occurs in Act 2, when Pedrillo persuades Osmin to drink wine in defiance of religious proscription and slips him a sleeping draught to ensure the quartet’s midnight escape. Here Marco wanted a strategic cut, the line in which Pedrillo uses mockery to goad Osmin into indulging: Freylich könnt ihr armen Schlucker das nicht begreifen, dass es so ein herrlich Ding um ein Gläschen guten alten Lustigmacher ist (“But of course, you poor suckers can’t appreciate just what a marvelous thing a good glass of wine is”)—along with a passing reference to “Mahomet,” so as to avoid directly ridiculing the Muslim’s faith and the Prophet himself. But of course, there was nothing to be done about Osmin’s craven fear that “Allah” might see him drinking, since that reference comes in the duet the two characters sing, and was thus untouchable.
More than calling for the excision of the odd offensive turn of phrase, Marco sought to temper the opera’s 18th-century chauvinism, so flagrantly out of step with contemporary identity politics, by mixing up the ethnicity of his casting: the tenor Minghao Liu, born in China and trained in Ukraine, sang the Spanish nobleman Belmonte; Harold Wilson, a decidedly Anglo-Saxon bass, sang the Ottoman harem keeper Osmin; and the part of Bassa Selim was assigned to the Italian-born Stefano de Peppo.
In the end, however, the BMF production’s most pointed act of de-racializing the Seraglio was simply its staging. Other noted productions, such as those at Glyndebourne in 1980, Covent Garden in 1988, La Scala in 2017, or Livermore Valley in 2018, used lavish Balkan folk costumes and elaborately crafted scenery à la Turque, the romantic trappings of an imaginary “Levant.” Marco avoided such patent Orientalism by having his singers perform a reduced drama directly in front of the onstage orchestra, which thus took the place of a stage set, supplemented only by the occasional colorful projection onto the back wall of the theater, to evoke the maritime surroundings of the pasha’s villa. The costumes were a mixture of Edwardian elegance and boarding-school chic: Selim, for example, resembled a Lord Mayor dressed for a diplomatic dinner, while Belmonte looked as if he had just returned from the cricket pitch. A bygone British finery was thus deployed as an anodyne stand-in for the more heated 18th-century imperialism of the Habsburgs and the Ottomans.
The effect of all these adaptations—in the appearance of the production as well as in the language of the dialogue—was not to impoverish the Bard Music Festival’s Seraglio by de-historicizing it, but instead to foreground the most timeless gifts of Mozart’s singspiel. Towering over these, of course, is its music, with bravura arias for Konstanze and Osmin in particular and an innovatively narrative quartet at the close of Act 2; but of crucial importance as well is the central lesson of Stephanie’s libretto, which, when relieved of its coarser ethnic opprobrium, clearly elevates kindness over coercion, trust over suspicion, and clemency over vengeance. Just as we heard it, in the audience at Opernhaus Zürich, 25 years ago this week.
This past June, after my work on the Bard Seraglio had wrapped up and before rehearsals had begun in upstate New York, I attended a very different production of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, at the Berliner Staatsoper. I couldn’t wait for the opera to be staged at Bard’s Fisher Center on August 16, and I had been so immersed in the material, had listened to so many different recordings, that I was optimally primed to enjoy a live performance.
The two versions, in Berlin and at Bard, bore some superficial similarities. The Staatsoper production, under the artistic direction of Andrea Moses and conducted by Thomas Guggeis, was as counter-ethnic in its casting as Bard’s, with the South African tenor Siyabonga Maqungo singing Belmonte, the Romanian soprano Adela Zaharia as Konstanze, and the Bavarian bass David Steffens playing the Turk Osmin. The Staatsoper sets, too, largely resisted Orientalism, opting instead for an anachronistic evocation of the beau monde on a cruise ship (with a mixed bag of temporal and cultural references in the costumes, including some parodically over-the-top Ottoman accessories).
But where the Bard production under Marco Nisticò was minimalist, laying the lightest of revisionist hands on the early modern material, Moser and her co-author Michael Höppner opted for a maximalist, positively didactic approach to the libretto. The star of the Berlin production, and himself a collaborator on the revised dialogue, was Bülent Ceylan, a German comedian of part Turkish ancestry who has centered his career on sending up contemporary German society and its problems with the integration of immigrants.
Ceylan prides himself on speaking no Turkish and instead boasts of his fluency in “the unmistakable dialect of Mannheim”—a city with an above-average immigration population and a center of Turko-German fusion—, which he calls “the ultimate proof of integration.” Ceylan is larger than life, with long flowing hair, a gym rat’s build, a motor mouth, and a tendency to stud his routine with references to heavy metal underscored by rambunctious air guitar—and so naturally Moser assigned him the role of the austere and moralizing Bassa Selim.
Or rather, Ceylan assigned it to himself, since in the Staatsoper’s production the comedian basically runs the show, stepping into and out of his role as the pasha to comment on the drama, perform stand-up comedy with explicit references to political affairs in 2026, and speak much of the characters’ dialogue for them: ostensibly to hurry things along but in effect to provide a running meta-critique of the opera’s outdated ideology. As with the Bard production, naturally, all of the music was kept intact, with particularly outstanding performances by Maqungo and Zaharia, the latter mastering Mozart’s typically sadistic settings for soprano with apparent insouciance and very nearly, and quite credibly, seduced by Ceylan’s sexy pasha, which added an intriguing nuance to the jealousy quartet in Act 2.
But the sheer profusion of stage business and tech gadgets, including having characters use smart phones to create videos from their onstage perspective, which were then streamed live to the audience, threatened to engulf the opera, especially in combination with Ceylan’s relentless, smartass, critical-theory-quoting patter. And the audience at the premiere on June 27 was not uniformly amused. In spite of pre-show remarks by dramaturg Detlef Giese, who was keen to prepare ticketholders for the radical version they were about to experience, and rather cringingly gave us explicit permission to laugh at the jokes we would soon hear, the applause at the curtain call was accompanied by some angry booing, in particular when Moser and her team came on stage.
In the end, the Staatsoper’s overblown, pedagogical production of the Seraglio actually reduced the work, by making it serve a political agenda far outside its own ideological world. Naturally I have no objection to using works of art from one era to make a political point in another, as Arens did when his placative recital of the pasha’s speech on clemency in September of 2001 became an appeal to contemporary Washington. Indeed, Mozart’s opera was itself an implicit comment on 18th-century current affairs, since it was conceived and performed as a tribute to the defeat of the Ottomans at the Battle of Kahlenberg in 1683, which had ended the siege of Vienna 99 years earlier and prepared the way for Habsburg ascendancy: the plot demonstrates the superiority, not of arms, but of ethics; indeed, the triumph of love over war. Tu felix Austria nube, and all that.
Furthermore, as Larry Wolff, author of The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon, pointed out in his onstage introductory remarks at the Bard Music Festival in August, Bassa Selim may be understood to represent the Habsburg Emperor Joseph II, Mozart’s new patron, who was seated in the audience at the Seraglio’s premiere: and thus in 1872 the opera was already functioning as a mirror held up to a prince, an allegorical masque celebrating the virtue of mildness in a ruthlessly modernizing world.
But for these very reasons it is unnecessary to add further layers of anachronism to Stephanie’s text, which functions at its hortatory best when the audience is allowed to simply draw its own historical conclusions. And while it is true that, in contemporary Germany, Turks and Turkishness have a valency that is unmatched in present-day America, and that it might therefore seem important, even irresistible, to champion the Seraglio’s lessons on tolerance and integration more explicitly to a German audience (especially now that the anti-immigrant, fascistoid AfD is on the rise), Ceylan’s humorous lectures on cultural appropriation to a self-selecting audience of bien pensant Europeans proved ultimately self-defeating. A singer friend who attended a subsequent performance, at which the claque was also loudly present, remarked: Es rächt sich, das Publikum für blöd zu verkaufen (“That’s what you get for treating the public like dummies”).
So in the end, the streamlined version produced at the Bard Music Festival last month, with my newly translated dialogue reduced to the max and the stage stripped virtually bare, was not in fact this year’s real reduction of Mozart’s work: the Staatsoper’s supercharged, over-hyped, gizmo-laden setting was.
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About those gender politics, though: they remain an unsettling strand of the Seraglio, unsettled in the recent Berlin and Bard productions both. In Mozart’s opera, women are held captive by men who threaten them with violence unless they submit; they defy their would-be rapists by declaring their willingness to die for the men they do love, who then come to rescue them, but only after they have had their morbid, victim-blaming suspicions about their beloveds’ virginity allayed.
The theme has continued to resonate beyond the Seraglio in 2026. As my work on the libretto was getting underway this past winter, it emerged that Leon Botstein, the conductor of the BMF Seraglio and President of Bard College since 1975, was mentioned in the Epstein files. At the time, in February of this year, Botstein promptly explained to Bard faculty and staff that he had indeed maintained contact with Jeffrey Epstein in the years prior to the latter’s arrest and the revelations about his trafficking, but that their relationship had been largely driven by Botstein’s fundraising duties. Botstein denied any knowledge of, let alone involvement in, any of Epstein’s criminal activities. He expressed his regret, but was evidently intent on staying on as president.
By May, however, when my work had concluded, further revelations had come to light: the conductor had apparently indeed continued his relationship with Epstein after the latter’s conviction on solicitation of a minor for prostitution, and Botstein was thus obliged to make a more radical decision: he would retire, after more than fifty years as college president.
The maestro who raised his baton on stage at Fisher Center on August 16, therefore, to conduct an opera about trafficked women who manage to escape from their tormentors, had been among the wealthy and connected patrons of a pasha-like financier whose business interests they knew to include just such trafficking, and from whose modern-day harem many of his captives did not escape.
If any seraglio has ever needed reducing, it is surely that one.