Il ratto dal serraglio by Mozart, sab 12 mar 2022, Da (2021/2022), Diretto da Johannes Pölzgutter, Direttore d'orchestra Guillermo García Calvo, Diego Martin-Etxebarria, Opernhaus Chemnitz, Chemnitz, Germania

On the estate of the Ottoman governor Bassa Selim: Three Europeans, Konstanze, Blonde and Pedrillo, were sold here as slaves. In the hope of being freed by her fiancé Belmonte, Konstanze resists the wooing of Bassa, who is determined to marry her by force if necessary. His palace warden Osmin would like to steal Blonde away from Pedrillo, but the self-confident Englishwoman knows how to defend herself. When Belmonte actually arrives and his ship is ready, the hour of rescue is near. But the kidnapping fails and so the Europeans have to expect death. While Osmin triumphs over the hated prisoners in fantasies of violence, Selim surprisingly gives them life and freedom. "Turkish music" and arias of sensitive love - "barbaric" Orient and "enlightened" Occident - at the same time characters of human depth and a final twist that seems to refute all clichéd attributions: The Abduction from the Seraglio unites almost mutually contradictory attitudes of Europe to the Orient . It is precisely this unfinished relationship that makes it so exciting, even 240 years after the premiere. While the work is now regarded as the epitome of German Singspiel, in the eyes of contemporaries it broke the boundaries of this genre. Mozart was guided by his understanding of music as the subject of dramatic development and the psychological portrayal of human beings. So he set much more to music than the literary original intended. In a phase of life of decided emancipation from his father and the final departure from the Salzburg service, he achieved overwhelming success and his most popular opera during his lifetime. Acting troupes throughout the German-speaking world quickly included the new play in their repertoire, so that even the Weimar theater director Goethe had to state that his own efforts for the Deutsches Singspiel no longer stood a chance, because "the kidnapping crushed everything". Director Johannes Pölzgutter, who, together with stage designer Nikolaus Webern and costume designer Janina Ammon, brought Die Fledermaus to the stage of the Chemnitz Opera with a lot of verve in 2018, takes up the clichés of the template ironically and playfully. He places Mozart's characters in a fairytale world from 1001 Nights, which he visibly shakes.