Word: seraglio
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Metropolitan Opera's. Best of all, there is Conductor Mario Bernardi, who since 1971 has presided over one of the first-rank summer opera festivals on the continent. He began the current season with a new production of Mozart's The Abduction from the Seraglio...
...Seraglio predates The Impresario by four years and is written in the style of the Singspiel (literally, song-play), the popular 18th century German comic opera. These days it needs a clever stage style-or more expert clowning-to make a convincing evening. This, alas, the opera failed to get from Director Anthony Besch, who unaccountably kept the action stiff and stately...
Under the dictatorship, the right had enjoyed such unique privileges as a law prohibiting strikes; as a result, Portuguese workers were the most poorly paid in Western Europe. How long businessmen would remain silent was still a question mark. "The families will fight like fury, like eunuchs in a seraglio, to retain their status," predicted Scares. "They will use all manner of economic and political sabotage...
...unintelligible aficionados, the opera is too often inaccessible to the uninitiated. The Boston Summer Opera Theater is trying to pull opera out of the grand halls, dropping both the formal trappings and the admission price. As a bait for newcomers the company is performing The Abduction from the Seraglio...
...Abduction from the Seraglio is early Mozart at its best. It's got a whole set of funny, likeable characters, from a sublime but fatuous talking pasha to a ridiculous, ferociously villainous guard who gives up his schemes with a malediction worthy of Malvolio or President Nixon. And it's got some remarkable music, from its opening serenade--Mozart had just got married when he wrote the opera, its heroine is named after his wife--to a sextet (I think) at the end that's so reconciling and beautiful and so on it makes everything Mozart wrote later on seem...