After attending the successful premiere of his opera Idomeneo, Re di Creta in Munich, Mozart had to move to Vienna in March 1781, following his patron Colloredo, to be present at the festivities of Joseph II of Habsburg's accession to the throne as Austrian emperor.
In May, the altercation with Colloredo occurred, which ended with Mozart's resignation. The twenty-five-year-old composer would then settle in Vienna to develop a career as a freelance musician. In July, he received an "orientalizing" libretto, for which he would write the music.
The "original" libretto
It had come at a good time. Joseph II, son of Maria Theresa of Austria, and brother of the unfortunate Marie Antoinette (not yet but will be), encouraged the creation of a German opera. To this end, he commissioned his "playwriter" Gottlieb Stephanie, to write a libretto that, musically staged, would result in a jovial, joyful spectacle. Stephanie, a disreputable character in Vienna, did not think long or very hard about it. He took one already published and modified it according to his own ideas (the original author claimed "plagiarism", but without much eagerness, since he had taken it from another).
A box-office success
Well, there in Vienna was Mozart, the celebrated author of Idomeneo, looking for opportunities... The two artists worked for a year in perfect harmony and the premiere of the three-act singspiel The Abduction from the Seraglio was celebrated with overwhelming success at the Burgtheater on July 16, 1782, with Mozart conducting from the keyboard. With excellent box office, performances abounded although the composer received no income from them. He was only paid once for the work.
The libretto was not exactly a masterpiece, but with its music, Mozart succeeded in making Stephanie's breezy stanzas his first big hit in Vienna. The libretto responds to the taste for "the exotic", which was all the rage in those years, although there was really nothing new about the fashion. As a leading historian and musicologist has pointed out, "Turkish operas, Turkish comedies, and Turkish novels were already in vogue in the 1600s". The story narrates the vicissitudes of Constanza, her maid and her fiancé, another servant, who after being captured during a pirate boarding, now serve a Turkish pasha, in his seraglio, his palace. Constanza's fiancé will try to rescue them. The story ends happily, thanks to the Pasha's clemency.
Cymbals and triangles
The novelty, perhaps, lies in the inclusion of "Turkish music" by means of instruments uncommon in the West for the time, such as cymbals or triangles, to create an "oriental" atmosphere. This is already noticeable in the Overture, with a very colorful atmosphere, capable of immediately introducing the audience to a fable-like ambiance.
With just over five minutes in length, the Overture is presented here, in a Vienna Symphony Orchestra performance, conducted by the Italian conductor Fabio Luisi.
