This addition to the Cambridge Opera Handbooks series is also the first
full-length study of Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. It aims to
familiarize the reader with all aspect of the work: Mozart's writing of
the opera and its literary antecedents, its plot, its musical structure,
its reception and performance history. The reader will find much that is
new in Thomas Bauman's study. He discusses the opera in relation to
other Oriental operas, in the light of eighteenth-centruy apprehensions
of the East, and as an attempt to reconcile the conventions of German
opera in the early 1780s with Viennese taste and Mozart's own maturing
operatic aesthetic. The text is well illustrated with pictures and music
examples and a full discography lists the available recordings of the
opera. This will be essential reading for all who have an interest in
Mozart's operas, whether as student, scholar or opera-lover.