Not So Grand Opera

Chronically poverty-stricken Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wanted to be married, decided to compose a light little Singspiel to pay the bills, titled it Die Entfuehrung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio). To make it popular, he set it in a harem. He filled it with "Turkish style" music and costumes which were fashionable in 18th Century Europe, gave the heroine his future wife's name Constanze. After the Vienna premiere in 1782, Emperor Joseph II said: "Too fine for our ears, my dear Mozart--and much too many notes." Despite the imperial reservation, Die Entfuehrung aus dem Serail (Kochel No. 384-) became Mozart's first permanently popular opera.

Last week Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera Company, where three of Mozart's four later and greater operas are consistent hits, put on its first production of The Abduction. Surprisingly, it was in English translation--one of three English-language operas in the Met's repertoire this season.

For Mozart fans who expected another Don Giovanni or Marriage of Figaro, it was a disappointment. The Abduction from the Seraglio is a trifle in which half of the dialogue is spoken, not sung. Its story (supplied by Librettist Gottlieb Stephanie, who borrowed it from a comedy by Dramatist Christoph Bretzner, who probably borrowed it from an English comic opera called The Captive) tells of an English cavalier and his manservant who try to liberate the cavalier's lady love and her maid from a Turkish pasha's harem.

Absurd as it is, the opera contains some of Mozart's most brilliant, buoyant, vocal music. But in the huge Metropolitan, the slight comedy was as close to lost as a puppet show in Madison Square Garden. One of the principals, Dezso Ernster, the Met's new basso, spoke and sang English with a Hungarian accent so thick he could not be understood. Most of the others went at Mozart's trifle like a man swinging at thistledown with a baseball bat. Somewhere along the line someone had forgotten that Mozart's little Singspiel was a lightweight musical comedy to be treated no more grandly than Broadway's Annie Get Your Gun.

-Mozart, who wrote 626 works in his 35 years, put no opus numbers on them. An industrious Salzburg musicologist, Dr. Ludwig Ritter von Kochel, got his name permanently attached to Mozart's by going through Mozart's notes, letters and records, and 71 years after his death, listing Mozart's known pieces in the order he wrote them. Kochel's catalogue, with his proofs and comments, filled 551 pages. Kochel's catalogue has been revised twice--most recently in 1937 by Mozart Biographer Alfred Einstein--after new Mozart material was found, and some of Kochel's listings were challenged.

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