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Mozart Adrift: Comedy Boards the Seraglio Berlin
Staatsoper
06/27/2026 - & July 1, 5, 8*, 11, 2026, January 31, February 2, 7, 2027
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart : Die Entführung aus dem Serail, K. 384
Adela Zaharia*/Brenda Rae (Konstanze), Serafina Starke (Blonde), Magnus Dietrich*/Jonah Hoskins (Belmonte), Michael Laurenz*/Lukas Schmidt (Pedrillo), David Steffens*/Stefan Cerny (Osmin), Bülent Ceylan (Pasha Selim)
Staatsopernchor, Gerhard Polifka (chorus master), Staatskapelle Berlin, Thomas Guggeis*/Tim Fluch (conductor)
Andrea Moses (stage director), Raimund Bauer (sets), Anja arabes (costumes), Irene Selka (lights), Andrea Gabriel (videography), Michael Höppner, Detlef Giese (dramaturgy)
M. Laurenz, S. Starke, A. Zaharia, M. Dietrich (© Stephan Rabold)
Since the turn of the last century, Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail has ceased to be produced with the same frequency as in earlier decades. This is despite the fact that after the three Da Ponte operas (Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte) and Die Zauberflöte, it’s his fifth most popular opera. Even his Graeco‑Roman operas, Idomeneo and La clemenza di Tito, appear more frequently at opera houses worldwide. The reason is due to the relative triviality of the subject matter and to stereotypes that are now deemed politically incorrect. And this, notwithstanding that at the work’s conclusion, the magnanimous Pasha Selim appears in the best possible light.
To better understand (and stage) this opera, it must be placed in its proper historical context. Though the Ottoman Turks had been an existential threat to the Habsburgs and almost invaded Vienna in 1683, substantial changes had occurred by 1782, the year Die Entführung aus dem Serail was premiered at Vienna’s Imperial Court Theatre (Burgtheater). Firstly, the Ottomans had declined and were on the retreat ever since their defeat by an ascending Russian Empire. The Russians had seized Ottoman territory on the Black Sea and in the Caucasus. The Ottomans were further destabilized by Russia’s support of independence movements by Christian Orthodox subjects within the Ottoman Empire. By the late eighteenth century, the Empire had acquired the sad title of “The sick man of Europe” and was no longer seen as a threat.
In the 1600 and 1700s, The Enlightenment had started sweeping Western Europe, leading to reforms and in some cases to revolutions. The death of absolute monarch Maria Theresa (1717‑1780) saw the succession of her reformist son, Joseph II, who attended the premiere of Die Entführung aus dem Serail. He was the first monarch to recognize the equality of religious minorities in the (then very Catholic) Habsburg Empire. Unlike France, Britain, Spain, the Kingdom of Naples, Prussia, Bavaria and Saxony (the major Western European powers of the time), the Habsburg Empire was a virtual mosaic of various nationalities and religions, including sizable Orthodox, Protestant and Jewish minorities. Recognizing these as equal in the eyes of the law was both courageous and revolutionary.
Berlin’s new Die Entführung aus dem Serail had been announced as an experiment, a collision between opera and stand‑up comedy, and one approached it with a degree of apprehension. Such attempts to “refresh” Mozart generally reveal a touching lack of confidence in the composer’s own theatrical instincts. Yet the evening proved rather more curious than disastrous, if ultimately less satisfying as music drama than as a social phenomenon.
Stage director Andrea Moses had relocated the action to a gleaming luxury yacht, an absurd floating palace of conspicuous wealth, complete with video projections of an endlessly undulating sea and live camera feeds projected onto large screens. Perhaps there is a confusion between eighteenth century Ottomans and present day Gulf Arabs. The imagery was undeniably slick and occasionally amusing, though one wondered whether so much apparatus had been assembled merely to distract from the opera itself. If there was an attempt to eschew political incorrectness, it was completely subverted by placing the action in the present.
The production’s central conceit was the insertion of comedian Bülent Ceylan into the role of Bassa Selim, not merely as the speaking character but also as a commentator upon the action and, intermittently, as himself. One felt that in an attempt to reduce the opera’s possible political incorrectness, Moses resorted to the German‑born Turk to render the opera more “progressive”. Such a patronising attitude is substantially more politically incorrect than anything Mozart and his librettist Gottlieb Stephanie (1741‑1800) had written. Indeed, the pair had presented liberal Emperor Franz II with a vision of the East influenced by The Enlightenment. That vision is more progressive than anything Moses and her stand‑up comic attempted to present.
An additional irritation of this experiment was that the stand‑up comedian, having appropriated the spoken dialogue, replaced it with his own narration of the story, liberally padded with tedious reflections on his experience as a German‑Turk, personal anecdotes, and laboured jokes. In total, he occupied well over a quarter of the evening’s running time. For the sizeable portion of the Staatsoper audience that is not fluent in German—perhaps a fifth of the house—the evening became an exercise in exclusion, as an inordinate amount of stage time was devoted to material entirely inaccessible to them.
There were moments when the comedy sat tolerably alongside the work’s inherent theatricality. More often, however, it seemed actively to work against it. The difficulty with Entführung is not that it lacks humour, but that Mozart’s comedy is inseparable from his humanity. Here, one frequently had the sensation that the score was being asked to wait patiently while the jokes took centre stage. The most affecting moments of the drama were repeatedly undercut by business elsewhere on stage, and one occasionally found oneself admiring Mozart’s resilience rather than the production’s ingenuity.
Certain episodes ostensibly designed to make Bassa Selim appear endearing were, in fact, deeply patronising and faintly offensive, confirming the old suspicion that those who advertise their progressivism most loudly often harbour the crudest stereotypes. Nothing illustrated this more clearly than the sight of Selim producing his stamp album to comfort Konstanze as she poured out her grief: a scene that amounted to the purest infantilisation, reducing “the Turk” to an emotionally stunted, almost childlike figure incapable of responding to suffering with genuine human feeling.
Musically, however, the evening was considerably more rewarding. First heard as Gilda in Madrid’s production of Rigoletto, Romanian soprano Adela Zaharia possesses a seductive dark timbre, a rarity among coloraturas with extreme ease in the stratosphere. Her Konstanze was the performance’s indisputable centre of gravity. She negotiated the terrifying demands of the role with astonishing technical assurance, her coloratura dispatched with brilliance and apparent ease. Yet what made the performance memorable was not merely its virtuosity but the dignity she brought to the character. In “Martern aller Arten” one heard not simply an exhibition of vocal prowess but a woman of unshakeable moral determination.
First heard in Madrid as Alfred in Die Fledermaus, Magnus Dietrich sang Belmonte with elegance and a most attractive timbre, producing his lines with considerable refinement. If one occasionally longed for greater variety of inflection and a more ardent emotional profile, the sheer beauty of the sound was difficult to resist.
Serafina Starke made an enchanting Blonde, her bright, gleaming soprano ideally suited to the role’s youthful defiance. She navigated the role’s high notes with ease. Endowed with a heftier soprano than that needed for the role, her soprano was still starkly different from Zaharia’s darker voice and blended well with it.
Heard last summer as Mime in Vienna’s production of Das Rheingold and Siegfried, Michael Laurenz’s Pedrillo combined musical intelligence with a genuine theatrical instinct that remained intact despite the production’s many distractions. This Pedrillo was not a mere character tenor playing second fiddle; he had ample stage presence and natural comic verve.
The evening’s most uncomplicated pleasure came from David Steffens’s Osmin. First heard as Félix in Donizetti’s Les Martyrs in Vienna, Steffens possesses a bass of enviable richness and resonance. Endowed with ample stage presence and a natural comic verve, he relished every threat and grumble, creating a figure who was both comic and faintly menacing. His performance reminded one how magnificently Mozart writes for low voices.
In the pit, Thomas Guggeis conducted with infectious vitality. The overture sparkled (despite the ill‑advised interruption by stand‑up comic Ceylan), the Janissary episodes possessed genuine brilliance, and throughout the evening the Staatskapelle Berlin played with admirable transparency and stylistic finesse. Guggeis resisted the temptation to treat the work either as a museum piece of Classical elegance or as a sequence of comic set‑pieces. Instead, he allowed its unexpected moments of tenderness and melancholy to emerge naturally from the texture. The transitions between comedy and sentiment were handled with remarkable sensitivity, and one frequently became aware that this ostensibly light Singspiel already contained the emotional depths of the mature Mozart.
One left the theatre with mixed feelings about the staging but none whatsoever about the music‑making. The production seemed uncertain whether it trusted Die Entführung aus dem Serail to entertain on its own terms; the performers and conductor, by contrast, had complete faith in Mozart, and they were abundantly vindicated.
Ossama el Naggar
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