The Streaming of the Seraglio

While Edinburgh cinemas declined the opportunity to stream  Sunday’s performance of Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail trom Glyndebourne  - Dorking, Bradford, and Milton Keynes were among the unlikely places that laudably accepted it - I seized my chance to watch the company’s transmission of the event on its own website.

It was by no means perfect. Too many blips on the live screening marred the transmission , particularly during the tension of Act Three, but nevertheless I got an impression of what David McVicar’s fine if controversial new production is like, as well as glimpses of the audience enjoying their picnics in the grounds.

Die Entfugrung - originally better known in Britain in its Italian version entitled Il Seraglio and now anglicised as “The Abduction” - is one of Mozart’s longest operas.  The Glyndebourne  version, largely uncut, started at five and finished more than four hours later, which may have been one reason why Edinburgh cinemas rejected it. But sung by a really good young cast, as this one was, it is a  marvellous, though still slightly underrated work, thanks partly to the Austrian Emperor’s famous comment to the composer after the premiere  that it contained “monstrous many notes.”

Dating from 1782, when Mozart was newly arrived in Vienna, it is a startling precursor in some ways of Cosi fan tutte, with a Fiordiligi-like heroine torn between two men and a story balanced on a knife-edge between the comic and the distraught.

McVicar, I thought, brought out this aspect of the piece more disturbingly than most directors, just as Glyndebourne’s new young music director, Robin Ticciati, admirably conveyed the music’s mixture of drama and exuberance, shot through with the clash of Turkish percussion, which was all the rage in Vienna at the time (it can even be heard in the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony).

Yet there is nothing racist in the approach, as there evidently is in the new production at Aix-en-Provence, which has provoked such fears of terrorist reaction that members of the audience have been searched for weapons as they arrive.

McVicar’s production is impressively truthful and unsensationalist, though undeniably irascible. Everyone, even the usually amicable Pedrillo, is made to seem on the point of exploding with impatience to the extent that Osmin, the Pasha’s threatening overseer, is not the accustomed shaven-headed brute but looks like someone fair-haired  and nasty out of Wagner’s Ring.

Though some of the London critics in their reviews chose to share the Emperor’s complaint about too many notes, the chance to hear a really complete performance  of the work struck me as well worth taking. Whether or not there were too many spoken words, they were part of the character of the piece and the extra music (including the heroic Belmonte’s Act Three aria, almost always omitted) was compensation. It was also a performance enlivened by its passionate and beautifully focused power of observation. When the DVD is issued next year I shall be buying it.
20 July 2015