The 36th Bard Music Festival: Mozart and His World
The Bard Music Festival returns with an exploration of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart, the most celebrated and recognized name in classical music.

Program 9: Friends, Family, and Students
Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos and his sophisticated “Linz” Symphony, composed in just four days, are two of the composer’s mature orchestral works. Program Nine, “Friends, Family, and Students,” presents them alongside examples by those within his inner circle: the Overture to Der Schulkandidat by his close friend Maria Theresia von Paradis, a musician who lost her sight at an early age; the festive Symphony in C by Marianna Martines, at whose musical soirées he was a frequent guest; the Overture in D by Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart, his youngest child, born just four months before his death, who went on to study with Salieri and Hummel; and the “Turkish” Symphony by Franz Xaver Süssmayr, the friend, student, and assistant of Mozart’s, who is best-remembered for his posthumous completion of the latter’s Requiem.

Program 11: “Too beautiful”: Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio
Mozart was commissioned to write The Abduction from the Seraglio (“Die Entführung aus dem Serail”) by Joseph II, who hoped to promote a German-language National Singspiel to rival Italian opera. An immediate success at its premiere, the work established Mozart’s reputation and remained one of the greatest successes of his career. The Abduction is the story of a Spanish nobleman and his fiancée. She and their two servants have been kidnapped by pirates and sold into the harem of a Turkish Pasha. Using intrigue and disguises to outwit their overseer, the lovers plot an escape. However, it is only when the pasha reveals unexpected nobility, choosing mercy over revenge, that the four regain their freedom. This story reflects the fascination that Turkey held for Mozart and his Viennese contemporaries, for whom the Ottoman Empire was not only a key cultural influence but also—in the long shadow of the Ottoman–Habsburg wars—a remembered military threat. Imagining the Ottoman world through Western eyes, the work is imbued with Orientalism, from Mozart’s approximation of Turkish music, loosely based on that of the famous Janissary marching bands, to exoticized characters like the buffoonishly brutal overseer. Yet the opera also complicates such stereotypes: the pasha’s final act of clemency gave Viennese audiences an Enlightenment lesson, presenting virtue as a universal trait and using the imagined East to critique Western cruelty. With its emphasis on historical scholarship and ability to provide a “rich web of context” (The New York Times), Bard is uniquely well-placed to explore these contradictions, when Botstein, the ASO, and the Bard Festival Chorale take part in a semi-staged concert performance of the opera. This forms Program Eleven, “Too beautiful”*: Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio, which draws the Bard Music Festival—and all seven weeks of Bard SummerScape—to a gripping close.