Following our production of Gluck’s wonderful opera Le Cinesi together with the National Peking Opera of China, we are once again focusing on international relations: together with the renowned Pera Ensemble consisting of Central-European and Turkish musicians, l’arte del mondo and stage director Igor Folwill collaborate to tell Mozart’s story “from inside the seraglio” and enrich the score with Ottoman sounds without defacing it. In this way, the Abduction unfolds its fairytale and utopian character.

Igor Folwill also took on the challenge of adapting the work for the Baroque stage of the Goethe Theater in Bad Lauchstädt (where the premiere of this project took place). In addition, there was the thematic confrontation: all the difficulties and “intrigues” that Mozart relocated in Abduction to Turkey, which was considered far away at the time, were also contemporary problems in the European states at the time the singspiel was written – an eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, feudal despotism and slavery. Light from the Enlightenment did not shine everywhere. Nevertheless, Igor Folwill manages to clothe the story in a rather fairytale-like guise taken out of time, which is both entertaining and pleasing to the eye.