Getting It Wrong

I wonder just for how long you can stretch out listening to an opera and still qualify as having listened to it as a single piece. I started on Mozart's The Abduction from the Seraglio last week but only played the second CD of the 2 CD set from my box of the seven major operas under the baton of John Eliot Gardiner this afternoon. Thoroughly enjoyed the opera as a whole despite having to read the English translation of all the spoken dialogue at high speed between arias to get the flow of the story. (The Gardiner version features a smattering of the dialogue to give a taste of the scenes but cut most of it.)

Found myself fascinated by the treatment of Muslim culture in the opera. The stereotyping is understandably heavy-handed - I was going to type and of its time, but then realized that much of it sounds contemporary. But what came as a surprise was the treatment of Pasha Selim as an enlightened ruler. I suppose this came about simply to provide the necessary happy ending, but there are moments in the final dialogue when the suggestions that he represents a wisdom far deeper than any of the 'western' characters appear explicit and have a curious power - as if hinting that there's the possibility of viewing the action from a different perspective entirely and that Constanze, our heroine, may be making the wrong, blinkered choice in rejecting the monarch. 

I seem to remember that in the movie Amadeus the Abduction gets a patronizing nod as a tuneful bit of entertaining froth, but it struck me as a lot more interesting than that. But tuneful certainly. Boy, is this stuff easy on the ear!