Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Mozart/Lichtenthal: Il Ratto dal Seraglio

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Get ready to audition what, for you lovers of Mozart's music, may be the strangest Mozart opera you've never heard! After his untimely death the master's operas were doctored quite a bit in adaptation to later operatic stage requirements.

Die Zauberflöte was first presented in Paris in 1801 in French language as Les Mystères d'Isis and was quite popular. For Parisian staging, Ludwig Wenzel Lachnith largely recomposed "The Magic Flute," making it over into a new yet vaguely familiar Egyptian opera, with numbers taken from other Mozart operas. Earlier this year on Sunday, May 22nd I broadcast what I presume is the world premiere recording for the Spanish Glossa label of the Mozart/Lachnith "Mysteries of Isis." Diego Fasolis led the period instrumentalists of Le Concert Spirituel and the Chorus of Flemish Radio.

This Sunday I offer for your audio consideration another makeover of a Mozart opera. This time it's "The Abduction from the Seraglio" in Italian-language adaptation as Il Ratto dal Seraglio. Mozart's eldest son, Carl Thomas, wanted to have all his father's mature operas produced at La Scala. The ones with librettos by Da Ponte were indeed staged in Milan between 1807 and 1818, along with La Clemenza di Tito and an Italian language adaptation of "The Magic Flute" renamed Il Flauto Magico. Producer Carl Thomas Mozart collaborated with the musical arranger Peter Lichtenthal (1780-1853), who doctored all the Mozart scores for the Milanese stagings.

Two decades later Lichtenthal went on to radically rewrite Die Entführung aus dem Serail. He composed entirely new Italian recitatives to replace the spoken Singspiel dialog. Il Ratto dal Seraglio could be termed a pastiche. Lichtenthal cut certain numbers from the Singspiel and replaced them with arias from other works in the Mozart operatic canon. He inserted music not by Mozart. The "Abduction" storyline and characters remained the same, however.

Lichtenthal's pastiche was ready to go into rehearsal in 1838 when its La Scala production was suddenly cancelled. It had to wait for its stage premiere until 2012, which came not in Milan but in Vicenza at the Teatro Olimpico. Giovanni Battista Rigon directed the orchestra of that theater and the chorus of I Polifonici Vicentini. In 2015 the world premiere recording of Il Ratto dal Serraglio came out on two compact discs through the Italian Bongiovanni label.