What a strange feeling this one generates. 

Fundamentally, it’s a stage musical, with a simple and mostly light story, and (in this production, at least) straightforward stage sets.  You know, the fake-looking beach, the motionless and uniform palm trees, not much else. 

They sneak in to rescue the ladies from captivity.  They speak a lot of their lines, and then stop for a solo or a duet, when that fits the story.  Seraglio has elements in common with your standard high-school spring musicals and community theater.

(If you were watching it with the sound turned off, you’d certainly be waiting for them to line up and dance in formation, with high-kickin’, quick-steppin’, audience-nauseatin’ numbers from Rodgers & Hammerstein.)

The difference is in the music, which is so complex, so fun to hear, and said to be so demanding of the sopranos and the bass, it seems much too expert and perfect for this kind of production.  (Kind of like Fidelio, where you feel like you’re watching a familiar sort of show, except the music sounds like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, not normal accompaniment.)

With 12 more years of practice after hammering out Mitridate, Mozart’s way out in front, and you could listen to the songs without anything at all on the stage, and it would be terrific.

I’m starting to get interested in the bigger picture of what Mozart was doing with his operas.  When I first saw Magic Flute, I had the feeling this guy was rather making fun of the concept – very over-the-top, much more is packed in there to get your attention, than the simple funny stories of Vivaldi.  Flute came 10 years later, but Seraglio suggests that the composer is already moving on: This is too easy, let’s hit ‘em with something really new.

The story heats up at the end, and then we have the final lines with a touching moral lesson.  "It is a far greater pleasure to avenge an injustice with good deeds, than to repay crimes with crimes”, the Pasha says, and that’s solid, as well as a suggestion for Rossini to work it into Cenerentola 36 years later.  Nice touch!  Not just the story, not just the exquisite music, but something to go home and think about as you run your life.

He also makes this point: “Those whom one cannot win over by kindness one has to get rid of.”  Well, okay, but maybe that clunky translation only appears on the screens of people who have gone through a tough breakup recently.  For everyone else, it says “Not everybody wants to be your pal.  Move on.”

Do I get to say anything about the singing?  Yes, but just a little?  Alright. 

First off, you get to hear Kurt Rydl as Osmin singing “the lowest note found in opera” and it is nicely done.  Good work down there, Kurt.

The Schwetzingen Festival in 1991 budgeted low for the stage sets, but their two sopranos struck me as fabulous.  They say this is tough music, and it seems very complicated to me, but everything the sopranos did was sung with power, smooth confidence, and quick articulation.  But now what about the tenor doing Belmonte?  Fine, but it just sounded like he slurred through the fast notes a little more than I wanted.  Wonder what our guy Flórez would have sounded like in that part.

(My answer: He does it better.  There’s a YouTube recording of Juan Diego singing “Ich baue ganz auf deine Stärke” from Seraglio, with a Peruvian accent.)

Finally, we now know the meaning of “singspiel” and the meaning of “recitative”. 

Singspiel is a stage musical – you have your speaking and you have your songs.  I gather that an “operetta” would be shorter than a singspiel, but then Mozart himself has a couple of one-acts that are called singspiels, so I give up.

Way too much speaking for me, in Seraglio, but – oddly and fortunately – the density of spoken lines seems to taper off as the opera progresses.   (Noticed this reduction in Offenbach’s wild Périchole too.)

Recitative is a different way to handle spoken lines – they kind of intone what they have to say, with music playing along behind, but not exactly with, the singer.  Quite a lot of this in Mitridate, if I remember correctly, but not used in Seraglio.

Personally, I would foot the bill for actual music and singing instead of either of these shortcuts.  I would also pay to find out what “spoken lines” is normally called in opera lingo, because I cannot find it.  Let’s go with “modo parlato” – who will argue?