Mozart’s ‘Abduction’ starring Diana Damrau sparkles at Met
Mike Silverman

NEW YORK—Two lovers who are separated by fate but remain true to one another. Show-stopping arias filled with coloratura ornamentation. Plenty of high notes. Lots of slapstick comedy. And, of course, a happy ending. All that was on display Saturday not once but twice at the Metropolitan Opera.
First the matinee audience was treated to Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Florez in the much-ballyhooed new production of Donizetti’s “La Fille du Regiment,” a performance that was witnessed by thousands more in movie theatres across the world. (Though they did not get to hear Florez encore his nine-high-Cs aria as he had on opening night.)
A few hours later, in contrast, Mozart’s “Die Entfuehrung aus dem Serail” (“The Abduction from the Seraglio”) slipped in almost under the radar, opening in a revival of a 29-year-old production that’s getting just four performances in the closing weeks of the season. While it may lack some of the glitz and glamour of the Donizetti, “Abduction” has plenty to recommend it, starting with a cast of five sterling principals led by German soprano Diana Damrau.
Damrau has been a rising star at the Met since her 2005 debut as Zerbinetta in Strauss’ “Ariadne auf Naxos” — coincidentally, the role in which Dessay made her mark in the house in 1997. As the heroine, Konstanze, Damrau spends much of the opera in a state of morbid grief over having been abducted from her sweetheart, Belmonte, and sold into the harem of the Turkish Pasha Selim. True to the part, she suppressed much of the natural charm and bubbly personality that make her such a lively stage presence.
But she came into her own in Act 2, when Mozart calls on Konstanze to hold centre stage for 17 minutes of almost uninterrupted singing, culminating in an aria of defiance, “Martern aller Arten,” in which she tells the pasha that no amount of torture will make her love him. That aria can be a kind of torture of its own for soprano and audience, filled as it is with rapid-fire runs and stratospheric high notes.