Abduction on the orient express: the transcontinental journey of a Mozart masterpiece.(Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail)

The Turkish siege of Vienna, in the summer of 1683, was ultimately unsuccessful--and in fact marked the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire. But it left Europe fascinated with Middle Eastern exoticism, and a century and more later the fascination was showing up in imitation Janissary music in works as disparate as Mozart's "Turkish Rondo" piano sonata and the alla marcia section of the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Composed ninety-nine years after the Turkish attack, Mozart's opera Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail dramatizes a standoff between Europeans and Turks, complete with faux-Turkish music in the overture and elsewhere.

But if a Turkish pasha and his harem seemed deliciously exotic to Mozart and his contemporaries, to modern audiences they're apt to be pretty incomprehensible. "In modern terms, we don't really understand what a seraglio is," says set designer Allen Moyer--"that it's like a brothel that this guy gets to be in for free." So when Moyer and stage director James Robinson were tapped several years ago to create an Entfuhrung for Wolf Trap Opera, they started kicking around ideas for updating the story.

They ended up moving Entfuhrung to another period of heightened European interest in the Middle East, the 1920s. And it was set aboard the Orient Express--"That's right," as Anna Russell might say, "on it"--in art-deco exuberance. The Wolf Trap production, which was presented in 1998, was necessarily a low-budget job, but for the 2001-02 season, Houston Grand Opera provided the opportunity to spruce up the concept for the intimate 1,100-seat Cullen Theater.

The slot in the HGO schedule opened when the planned premiere of Mark Adamo's Lysistrata had to be put off because the opera wasn't going to be finished in time. Although the proposed Entfuhrung would be much less expensive than a world premiere, Robinson told HGO general director David Gockley that the Orient Express decors would need a lot of detail, and that wouldn't be cheap. Robinson proposed involving several opera companies in a coproduction, and five others eventually signed on. Boston Lyric Opera presented the production this past November; Opera Pacific has it booked for January 21 to 26; and Lyric Opera of Kansas City follows from March 15 to 23. Opera Colorado and Minnesota Opera will present it in 2005-06. The production cost $731,000, of which $200,000 was covered by coproducers. So in the end, Houston was out only $531,000 for Entfuhrung, as opposed to the $1.2 million budgeted for Lysistrata.

Although Entfuhrung is filled with enchanting music, its relatively static action can challenge a stage director's imagination. Setting the opera on the Orient ...