It is not controversial to suggest that over time exposure to violent imagery can lead to desensitization. The more we watch, the more we are comfortable watching. There is a culture of one-upmanship in Regietheater productions that attempts to overcome desensitization. Shocking audiences to jolt them out of their comfortable opera-watching reveries is a common goal in this art form, so for audiences who see a lot of Regietheater the shock value of the productions must logically continue to increase or at least modulate. There seems to be a certain kind of desensitization to the violence of Regie at work in reviewers of Bieito’s Entführung who casually brush off the graphic violence of this production to the tune of “there goes Calixto, up to his tricks again.”Entführung group the representations of sexual violence in this production together with, for instance, nudity and representations of drug use into a single category of typical Regietheater scandal-mongering. In his 2013 history of opera production and staging, Evan Baker voices his distress about directors who “have inserted graphic sexual situations or seemingly pointless nudity into Page 84 →the dramaturgy of an opera, in some cases to excess, causing much revulsion” and uses this Entführung production as a case in point.4 A reviewer for the Metropolitan Opera Guild expresses concern about the brutalization of sex workers in this production, but he connects it with his concerns about Belmonte’s cross-dressing and a scene of homoerotic contact between women—as if rape might be effectively understood as an expression of queer sexuality.5 A review for the Irish Times includes a quote from a spectator at the theater who said, “I don’t know what all the fuss is about, if they knew anything about Mozart, they’d know that there’s loads of this sort of thing in his letters.”6 I assume this audience member was referring to Mozart’s well-documented appreciation for scatological humor. This too denies any real difference in kind between representing rape and torture and representing nudity and urination. It implies that any objection to this staging must be based merely in prudishness.

Although I approached this production as a researcher and informed about its contents, I could not share in the cynical immovability of many of the critics cited above. The most infamous scene of violence in this production is Konstanze’s aria, “Martern aller Arten.” My first experience watching this scene was through grainy archival footage on my laptop screen on a sunny afternoon—surely not Bieito’s intended circumstances—and even then, I was so troubled by the staging that I needed to walk away from this research for several days. There is something striking about seeing this kind of violence in the context of live performance. Even a video of a live performance that took place fifteen years prior held for me a different kind of power than a similar depiction of violence represented in film—an aura of liveness. There is no camera work when you are looking at a stage; no one can frame the image or cut away at key moments to guide an audience member’s eye. I was not asked to imagine anything but only to watch. I could not help but stare, horrified, at every moment.

Desensitization is not the only risk to viewing graphic depictions of fictional violence, though. Despite regular exposure to violent imagery in the media, I found this production difficult to bear at first watching and I still do, now. Watching the dehumanizing treatment of the women in this production stirred up the anxiety I carry as a woman navigating a patriarchal society; these representations of violence did not just make me feel uncomfortable, they made me feel afraid. As I discussed in the introduction to this book, in relation to Catharine Woodward’s objection to Damiano Michieletto’s Guillaume Tell, these kinds of representations have the potential to retraumatize survivors in their audiences, and given the prevalence of sexual violence in our society, this is not a risk we should take lightly.

Page 85 →My forthcoming descriptions of the acts of sexual violence in Bieito’s production are not exempt from these risks. Yet not including the details of these representations would not be a suitable solution. Reviews of this production often invoke innuendo to discuss the sexual violence, and I worry that doing so makes it easier for them and their readers to include rape on these lists of non-violent depictions deemed to be in bad taste. My analysis of this production treats the representations of sexual violence as fundamentally different from the nudity, cross-dressing, and simulations of urination and drug use onstage. Based on the reviews cited above and others like them, sexual violence is grouped together with these other “scandalous” elements of Bieito’s Entführung insofar as it is seen to threaten both the perceived seriousness of opera and the hegemony of the composer’s wishes. These are not my concerns. My focus is on protecting not the legacy of the opera but the people who stand to be negatively impacted by its continued performance. Among this group I count not only audience members, but also members of identity groups that are stereotyped in the written text of Entführung and in the productions discussed here, namely women, Muslims, and sex workers.

In this chapter, I present a framework through which the choice to represent sexual violence in an opera like Entführung may be seen to be, perhaps paradoxically, the more ethical decision from a feminist point of view. However, beyond recognizing the choice to represent sexual violence at all as ethically defensible, I need to ask whether these representations in particular support or undermine that choice. To do so requires consideration of the details of these representations: What exactly is shown? And are the specific elements of those representations necessary and sufficient to the drama of the scene and the functioning of the director’s critique? To this end, I describe the depictions of sexual violence in detail, prioritizing precise and unambiguous language. These descriptions occur in the section entitled “Performing Rape.”

Sexual Violence and Agency in Captivity

Die Entführung aus dem Serail is a rescue opera, and as such, its female characters lack agency in the primary propulsion of the plot. The opera renders Konstanze and Blonde objects and Belmonte and Pedrillo subjects (the latter to a lesser extent due to his low class). The men rescue; the women are rescued. Mozart offers some critique of this formulation by giving Konstanze some of the most beautiful music in the opera. Her arias are show-stoppers and the power of her voice and rhetoric is undeniable, even as she finds herself helpless within the contraptions of the plot. Gretchen Wheelock reads Page 86 →“Martern aller Arten” as “a powerful statement of resistance” proportional to the Pasha’s power over her.Entführung’s eighteenth-century authors, Bieito also offers a critique of rescue convention, though it is in some tension with the work of his predecessors. Bieito’s Pasha is so immediately frightening that his mercy at the end is hard to understand in terms of Enlightenment as Bretzner intended. His pity for Konstanze emerges from a violent, vengeful mania, and while it is presented as genuine, it does not feel earned by the story. Bieito’s critique of the rescue formula comes instead from the revelation of Belmonte’s priorities in the final scene. Belmonte’s heroism erodes over the course of the third act. He relishes slaughtering the brothel’s clientele and sex workers and emerges as the new Pasha, taking charge of what infrastructure remains. The hero becomes the villain, and the only escape left to a decidedly un-rescued Konstanze is suicide.

Although Konstanze and Blonde are the only named women in the opera, Bieito populates his stage with a number of sex workers engaged at the brothel. These sex workers serve as elements of the mise-en-scène and props for the main characters. Throughout the opera, the sex workers have no agency and are consistently dehumanized. They are tools for Osmin to use Page 88 →against his enemies and to satisfy his own desires; they are effigies on whom Selim can inflict damage in order to hurt Konstanze; they are collateral damage, serving in their deaths to expose Belmonte and Pedrillo’s true colors; and throughout all of this, they are scene dressing. After they are murdered, the bodies of these women remain onstage as props for Osmin to interact with through the opera’s conclusion. Their deaths constitute a progression between two states of objectification—from sex toys to corpses. Bieito only shows us these sex workers in a large undifferentiated group. The production denies them their individuality and reduces them to their work and to their relationship with Osmin and the brothel. Even Blonde is at risk of deindividuation in this production as a sex worker herself. One early reviewer of this production actually failed to differentiate Blonde from the supernumerary sex workers, identifying her at one point not by name but as “a peroxide-blonde prostitute.”8

Konstanze, then, is the only female character onstage who is able to even attempt to act as an agent in the story, and she is either undermined or punished at every opportunity. We watch her constant abuse, and after witnessing another woman be tortured and murdered just to teach Konstanze a lesson it is hard not to wonder if her resistance is really worth it. If she would have just slept with Selim, maybe that sex worker would still be alive. Furthermore, the time Konstanze does not spend in a cage or on a leash she spends in Selim’s or Belmonte’s arms. Despite her incredible strength of will in denying Selim’s requests of her, she is trapped under the unending control and surveillance of one of these two men. In the end, Konstanze believes the only way she can bring her situation to an end is suicide. And based on everything we have seen in Bieito’s production, this is not an illogical conclusion.

In the libretto, Konstanze and Blonde essentially function as objects for exchange in the conflict between Belmonte and Bassa Selim as representatives of the Enlightened West and the obscurantist East. Yet within that framework, Mozart’s women exert power through their music: Konstanze through her vocal extravagances and Blonde through comic irreverence in the face of Osmin’s threats. Bieito largely nullifies even this micro-agency in his representations of Konstanze and Blonde. In doing so, he makes a powerful statement about the ways in which women’s agency can be compromised by men in the sex trade. This production points out that the agency we read onto Konstanze and Blonde through their music is a fantasy. By transplanting the story from an Orientalist daydream to contemporary reality, Bieito suggests that Entführung has been a story about sex slavery all along—as distasteful as this might be to some opera fans. But simply presenting this stark Page 89 →vision of women stripped of their agency does not in itself operate as critique. In the following sections, I examine the specific ways the creative team of this production render the acts of sexual violence onstage, and then consider the work these representations do in crafting Bieito’s critique.

Performing Rape

The first scene of sexual violence occurs early in Act I during Osmin’s aria, “Solche hergelauf’ne Laffen.” After dismissing Belmonte, who is seeking entry into the palace, Osmin rages at Pedrillo, accusing him of lecherousness and laziness. The aria concludes with a laundry list of the startlingly violent ways in which Osmin wishes to see Pedrillo killed. In Bieito’s staging of this scene, Osmin addresses Pedrillo, but he interacts primarily with an obsequious group of sex workers who surround him and laugh as he insults his rival. One sex worker in lingerie gives Osmin an erotic massage, and he pulls her down onto the ground where they caress each other sensually. Osmin simulates performing oral sex on her, and after responding positively at first, the woman suddenly screams—presumably he has bitten her—and tries to move away from him. Osmin grabs her by her ankles, drags her back toward himself, and pins her to the stage in the fetal position. He eventually lets her get up and directs his anger at Pedrillo for the remainder of the aria. This act of violence is the first time in the opera that we see Osmin exert his power over the women in the brothel. We learn that he can hurt them casually as it suits him.

Osmin inflicts a similar mix of sexual play and violence on Blonde in their Act II duet, “Ich gehe doch rate ich dir.” In the written text, Blonde sings an aria in which she rebukes Osmin’s attempts to be intimate with her, and then in this duet, she declares that she will never be his slave and threatens to scratch out his eyes, ultimately chasing him from the room. Bieito’s staging of this scene begins with Blonde alternating between stomping around arms akimbo and coyly dancing for Osmin. In the duet, they argue and push each other around in a way initially played for comedy. At several points, Osmin removes articles of Blonde’s clothing and attempts to initiate sex with her, and her refusals are characterized by an eye-rolling exasperation more than a real fear. Midway through the duet, however, Osmin adjusts his tactics and the stakes change. He drags Blonde to her feet by her hair and pours vodka all over her body before threatening her with a lighter. She bites his wrist, which causes him to drop the lighter and starts a vicious fight between them. The much larger Osmin pins Blonde to the ground and punches her hard Page 90 →in the stomach. She begins to cry, and Osmin urinates into a glass tumbler which he places next to her. The set rotates them out of view before Blonde can drink. Like in “Solche hergelauf’ne Laffen,” Osmin’s sexual playfulness transforms into brutality. He puts Blonde in her place with a combination of physical abuse and humiliation that reduces her to a shadow of herself for the remainder of the opera.

Selim’s approach to sexual violence differs from Osmin’s. Whereas Osmin’s acts of violence are clumsy and spontaneous, Selim’s are calculated and precise. The only explicit act of sexual violence he commits is a digital rape of Konstanze during her first-act aria, “Ach, ich liebte.” In this aria, Konstanze sings about the pain of being separated from her betrothed, Belmonte. In Bieito’s version, Konstanze is held in a small cage (perhaps a dog kennel). Over the course of the aria, Selim opens the cage and leads Konstanze out on a leash. While she sings, he escalates from kissing her ankles to penetrating her with his fingers. Osmin’s abuses are shocking for their proximity to and growth out of comic amorous gestures; Selim’s, by contrast, shock by their sheer depravity. Osmin’s musical numbers above are comic, but “Ach, ich liebte” is in the high dramatic mode of an opera seria heroine. Bieito transforms Konstanze’s soliloquy about her emotional suffering into a brutal, physical ordeal at the hands of her captor. This staging presents a disturbing parallel between the “Liebe Schmerz” Konstanze names in her aria as she mourns Belmonte and the twisted “Liebe Schmerz” of Selim’s punishment for not loving him back.

Finally, there is the scene that seems largely responsible for the infamy of this production, “Martern aller Arten.” In Konstanze’s second aria, she is punished for the retaliatory violence she inflicts on Selim by being forced to watch Osmin violate and murder a sex worker. In the aria’s written text, Konstanze defiantly tells Selim that she will willingly face any torment before she betrays her love, but ultimately, she requests Selim’s mercy. As Konstanze sings, Osmin emerges with a sex worker in tow, and the two engage in apparently consensual sexual activity. After some kissing and foreplay, Osmin throws the woman onto her back on the ground at Konstanze’s feet, and the woman laughs and beckons him to come closer. Osmin straddles the woman on his knees, and she performs fellatio on him. Selim holds Konstanze by her hair, making her watch. Osmin pulls a knife, which he shows to Konstanze. He pushes the woman’s shoulders down onto the stage and stuffs a cloth into her mouth. When she sees the knife, the woman panics and struggles to get away, but Osmin’s weight holds her in place. He systematically makes long cuts on her face, both her forearms, her back, her chest, and finally across her Page 91 →throat. After she has ceased moving, Osmin cuts off her nipple and presents it to Konstanze as she sings the climactic ending of her aria. This is the first death of a sex worker in this production, and it is excruciating to watch. Osmin’s relaxed approach to the deed highlights the arbitrariness of this murder—the sex worker he chooses here is a stand-in for Konstanze to show her what will follow if she continues to resist Selim. The power of Konstanze’s resistance, which Wheelock recognizes in this aria, is obliterated.9 Konstanze’s words invite Selim’s torture and anticipate the freedom that will come from death, but there is no salvation in the death she is made to witness, and we will sense no salvation in her eventual suicide.

As with some of the productions of Salome in chapter 2, the context of performance within the fictional world of the opera and the thematization of spectacle and the gaze informs our spectatorship. The most infamous act of violence in Bieito’s production situates sexual violence in this context. Selim forces Konstanze to watch as Osmin violates, tortures, and murders a supernumerary sex worker. The acts of violence serve primarily to teach Konstanze a lesson; they are, above all else, done to be seen. Osmin’s abuse of the sex worker in “Solche Hergelauf’ne Laffen” may similarly be seen as, Page 92 →in part, a performance for the other sex workers and for Pedrillo to demonstrate Osmin’s power over all of them. And although the other sexual assaults take place in private in the context of the story, our spectatorship of them from the audience is informed by the way women’s bodies are represented as objects for display in this production’s mise-en-scène. With Salome, the self-consciously spectacular elements of the Dance of the Seven Veils often had troubling implications when the Dance was replaced with a rape. In the case of Bieito’s Entführung, though, I get the sense that the dissonance between watching the supernumerary sex workers perform in the background and watching the rape and murder of other sex workers in the foreground is the point. This production problematizes the tendency of its audience to gaze at the bodies of the supernumerary performers by pulling the curtain back on the dangerous and violent underworld they represent. Bieito’s use of nudity and dramatic realism is a part of what makes his representation of violence so shocking, and it also raises questions about objectification and perspective with regards to our spectatorship of sexualized and suffering women’s bodies.

Nudity has become one of the hallmarks of Regietheater, especially according to its critics. As I pointed out above, some reviews of this production do not differentiate between the graphic acts of sexualized violence and the appearance of nude bodies. I have no ethical quarrel with onstage nudity in itself. However, Bieito’s particular uses of nudity in Entführung are wrapped up in his representations of sexual violence, its perpetrators, and its victims. There is a great deal of nudity in this production, though among the main characters of the opera, we see only Osmin fully nude. In the background, supernumerary sex workers and their clients appear nude, both to engage in simulated sex and, in the case of the women, to pose in glass boxes advertising their services. Bieito’s use of nudity in this production is not uniform. Sometimes it highlights the comedy of the score, as when Osmin bounces on a bed with his genitals exposed. Other times it constructs the realism of the brothel, as in the case of the supernumeraries engaging in sex around the set. The two women whose nude bodies appear in the foreground of Bieito’s staging are the two sex workers that are victims of Osmin’s violence. The woman Osmin kills in “Martern aller Arten” has her body increasingly exposed while he tortures her. He pulls her dress and brassiere down so he can cut her back and chest, and as she writhes around on the ground, her skirt rides up, exposing her buttocks to the audience while she struggles to escape.

One of the dangers of putting sexual violence onstage is the potential eroticization of the violated female body. Theater scholar Charlotte Canning links staged sexual violence with pornography and outlines a number of alternativePage 93 → feminist modes of representation that focus on a stylization of the idea of rape rather than the physical act in an effort to eschew the pornographic potential of exposed women’s bodies.10 Canning’s citation of pornography is interesting. In 1983, anti-pornography lobbyists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon drafted a set of ordinances that proposed treating pornography as a violation of women’s civil rights in the United States. The ordinances were ultimately deemed unconstitutional on the grounds of freedom of speech protections, but the definitions of pornography in the proposed ordinances have been influential on continuing anti-porn campaigns in the US and Canada. Dworkin and MacKinnon proposed a list of conditions that when combined with “the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words” constitute pornography. The conditions relevant here are:

a. Women are presented as dehumanized sexual objects, things or commodities; or . . . d. women are presented as sexual objects tied up or cut or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt; or e. women are presented in postures of sexual submission, servility, or display; or . . . h. women are presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, abasement, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised, or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual.11

Regardless of the potential political value of these ordinances, it is worth noting on how many counts Bieito’s depictions of sex and sexual violence constitute the kind of pornography Dworkin and MacKinnon opposed. I will talk more about Bieito’s representation of sex work later in this chapter, but it is certainly true that the nudity and sexual gestures of the supernumerary sex workers serve to commodify the women in the brothel. Their servility to Osmin’s sexual whims is similarly clear. Conditions A and H apply to the sex worker Osmin kills as well as to Konstanze, whom Selim strips down to her undergarments while she is leashed and bound. The sexualization of the violence done to the women in this opera is especially clear in the last scene. When Belmonte and Pedrillo massacre all the available inhabitants of the brothel, many of the sex workers are killed while in the act of having sex with clients. This proximity of death and sex leads to a troubling sexualization of their naked and near-naked bodies, which lie strewn across the stage for twenty-two minutes until the end of the opera.

The erotic treatment and reception of the female body in scenes depicting rape and victims of rape onstage is an old problem in the theater. Elizabeth Page 94 →Howe argues that the introduction of actresses to the English Restoration stage caused a spike in the portrayal of rape in English theaters. Rape was both “a way of giving the purest, most virginal heroine a sexual quality,” and an excuse to expose naked female flesh.Entführung accomplishes both of these tasks. Konstanze is beyond reproach as a heroine in Bretzner’s story—chaste and faithful even in the face of certain death. But in Bieito’s torture chamber she is made to be Selim’s sexual plaything. The problem with exposing women’s bodies onstage, especially in proximity to representations of sexual violence, is essentially a problem of perspective. Bieito is a male director telling a story in which the sexual violation of women serves to inspire a male protagonist to action. In this context, it is also easy to recognize the way Bieito uses the exposed bodies of the women who represent the sex workers in this production to express his concept and his critique. Both within the story of the opera and outside of it, these women’s naked bodies are wielded as tools by men.

When it comes to these scenes of violence, Bieito’s production subscribes to an excruciating realism.Entführung is remarkably realistic. The violence onstage, like the sex, happens in full view of the audience without any veils of stylized movement or dance. The fight choreography is highly realistic and accentuated by convincing use of fake blood. This version is also cut down significantly from the original so that the action is always moving forward.14 Bieito’s newly written dialogue scenes are remarkably naturalistic. They employ different German dialects for different characters and discard the poetic scansion of the original. Even in the arias and other numbers, Bieito’s singers are unusually active; almost every moment of music is filled with involved stage business. This level of naturalism is unusual in opera, and certainly contributes to the shock value of this production because the action in this realist mode is so horrifying.

Realism is not a value-neutral mode of representation, and within feminist theater criticism there are disagreements about its potential benefits. Elin Diamond summarizes the feminist attack on theatrical realism thusly: “Setting out to offer truthful versions of experience, realism universalizes but one point of view. . . . In the process of exploring social (especially gender) relations, realism ends by confirming their inevitability.”Entführung’s narrative is certainly masculine;Page 95 → rescue operas typically tell tales of heroics in which women are objects of exchange between men, and Entführung is no exception.17 Diamond and Aston might argue that by telling this story through a lens of theatrical realism, Bieito does nothing to challenge the masculine point of view of the story. A naturalistic aesthetic takes as a given that the world presented on Bieito’s stage is the real world. And on this stage, where women are beaten, raped, and murdered without consequence, naturalism’s attestation to reality can be seen as an acquiescence to the inevitability of violence against women.

Other feminist scholars of theater and literature have defended realism as an aesthetic not necessarily opposed to a feminist project. Patricia Schroeder and Kim Solga have both made cases for the feminist and even radical potential of theatrical realism.18 These arguments hang on the enduring popularity of realist depictions among spectators and the intense identification with fictional characters and situations that realist depictions make possible. Throughout Bieito’s production, Konstanze and Blonde have brutally realistic responses to the violence done to them. Their trauma plays out in different but recognizable ways: Blonde abuses pills and alcohol, and Konstanze becomes totally dependent on Belmonte after witnessing the sex worker’s murder and eventually dies by suicide. In a sense, these characters can be more easily identified with because they behave more like real people than do their Mozartean archetypes—the feisty maid and the sentimental heroine. But despite Bieito’s more realistic characterization, the caricatures persist and this dichotomy is jarring. Konstanze and Blonde, while their reactions to trauma are informed by a more realistic approach to the opera’s plot, are still a far stretch from complex, responsible depictions of sexual assault survivors. Bieito’s new dialogue is tilted toward the men in the opera. Most of the little that the women have to say and sing in this production was written for them by Stephanie and not Bieito, so it enforces their archetypal roles and does not respond to the violence done to them in between their words. Yet while Bieito does not give the women much to say, his use of the opera’s music, especially in his staging of Konstanze’s arias, goes some distance to generating empathy and encouraging audience identification with her experience.

The interaction of Bieito’s stage business and setting with Mozart’s music has fueled a good deal of the controversy in the popular press. Reviewers report cries of “poor Mozart” from the house at the public dress rehearsal and on opening night. Though this tendency to frame criticism of Regie productions of canonic operas as a defense of the composer’s presumed intentions or wishes is common, it is rarely a very interesting way to evaluate a production in my view. In Bieito’s Entführung, the argument that “that’s not what Mozart Page 96 →wrote” is especially shallow because Bieito’s staging is actually highly sensitive to details in Mozart’s score. Despite the vast difference in tone between this and a more conservative production of Entführung, Bieito’s dramaturgical style throughout is surprisingly well integrated with Mozart’s music. Bieito recontextualizes the music in a variety of ways throughout his drama and harnesses it for his own dramatic project. Clemens Risi uses this production as one of his prime examples to demonstrate a technique in opera production in which a director “uses musical structures to legitimate his scenic choices.”19

There is a kind of violence in the noisy, motoric drive of Mozart’s Turkish marches in this opera. In her review of the production, musicologist Micaela Baranello comments on Mozart’s alla turca style in Entführung, noting that “Bieito makes a lot of its gaudiness and maniacal repetitive energy.”alla turca at the production’s conclusion is somewhat more subversive. After the murders of Selim and Osmin, the chorus runs on, presumably representing the employees and patrons of the brothel who survived Belmonte and Pedrillo’s earlier massacre. The final chorus is thick with percussion and bells, and the whole company accents practically every attack. In the instance of this final chorus and much of the alla turca throughout this production, I think that Bieito is capitalizing on the dissonance between the music and the experience of our main characters, pointing out that the jaunty Turkish music in this opera about captivity in a harem was problematic to begin with. The disjunction between the cheerful, comic alla turca music and the darkness that Bieito exploits in the opera’s story characterizes this production as a whole. But within this frame, Bieito also plays off of Mozart’s music in more specific ways in the scenes of sexual violence.

Osmin and Blonde’s duet, “Ich gehe doch rate ich dir,” works differently in its musical and scenic correlation. Over the course of the number, the balance of musical power shifts from Osmin to Blonde by way of changing who introduces new musical material and influences the register of the other character’s music.Entführung in which Blonde can control Osmin, but when the music fades we are left with only the sounds of Osmin’s fists landing and Blonde’s laughter turning to cries of pain. These sounds from the actors onstage, the beating and the crying, contribute to the sonic profile of Bieito’s production. Like the sex worker’s scream that marks the first act of violence Osmin commits, Blonde’s sobs and the sounds of Osmin’s fists characterize the seriousness of Bieito’s concept amid and around the sounds of Mozart’s music. The last sound we hear in Bieito’s production is the gunshot that signifies Konstanze’s suicide, which happens just after the final notes of the score have been played. These sounds decenter Mozart’s music as the only sonic signifier during the musical numbers of the opera. Bieito’s vision encroaches on what most opera-goers hold most dear in their favorite works—the sound of the music—and in so doing does not allow his listeners to simply close their eyes to block out the production (a popular tactic of the Regie-hating opera-goer).

Bieito stages Konstanze’s two arias, “Ach, ich liebte” and “Martern aller Page 98 →Arten,” in a way that aligns spectators with Konstanze’s experience of the events taking place onstage. These are both highly emotional and introspective tours de force for Konstanze, but in Bieito’s production both are staged in ways that strip her of agency in the plot even as she seems to have so much in the music. In “Ach, ich liebte,” Konstanze is violated by Selim and in “Martern aller Arten” she is forced to watch a murder. In both, Bieito harnesses the extravagance of her singing voice to express the powerful emotions of the character. Konstanze’s high-flying coloratura passages in “Ach, ich liebte” become vocalized responses to the increasingly horrible things Selim does to her, culminating in the digital rape.Martern aller Arten,” Konstanze’s coloratura is associated with her responses to the action. These passages become shrieks that Konstanze releases when Osmin cuts the sex worker somewhere new or when the bleeding woman grasps at Konstanze’s legs. Osmin slits the sex worker’s throat on Konstanze’s sustained high C. At the aria’s conclusion, a long vocal trill scores the tremor of the sex worker’s legs before she falls limp on the downbeat of Konstanze’s cadence. The final coloratura passages, which are the most elaborate in the aria, are sung here in response to Osmin holding out the bloody nipple. Bieito’s technique of aligning physical and musical gestures in his staging ensures that these scenes of violence do not feel entirely disconnected from Mozart’s music. In addition to legitimizing the staging for the spectator, as Risi argues, the use of this technique in these two arias draws us closer to Konstanze’s point of view.23 She screams on our behalf as we join her in witnessing these acts of shocking brutality.

Production as Criticism

Bieito is using Mozart and Stephanie’s written text to do something that it was not intended for. Rather than a comic work of entertainment, Bieito’s Entführung is a dark, gritty examination of the sex trade. This production can also be understood as a cogent criticism of the opera’s written text and its performance tradition. While the thesis that comes through most clearly in this production is that the sex trade is deeply exploitative and dangerous, ultimately, I find the secondary critical theme to be the most interesting element of this production.

Bieito’s focus on the twentieth-century European sex trade allows him to transplant Entführung and bypass some of the problems of this opera’s representations of Islam. However, whitewashing the characters and setting does not erase the troubling racial implications of setting an opera that stereotypesPage 99 → and villainizes Turkish people in a contemporary German brothel. Turkish immigrants make up the largest ethnic minority group in Germany, and the presence of this large primarily Muslim Turkish diaspora has been perceived by some as a threat to German social and political order.Entführung in a contemporary brothel is not without critical merit. It is meaningful that in Bieito’s production, it is not only Osmin and Selim that mistreat women and profit from their suffering. When Belmonte takes on the role of Pasha at the end of the opera, Bieito seems to be arguing that the problems of the sex trade are not problems of individual bad men but are systemic.

Bieito’s production is clearly critical of European brothels, but its representation of the seraglio as a brothel is confusing and inconsistent from the perspective of the German sex trade in the early 2000s. Within the walls of Bieito’s brothel, everything about the action seems to refer to an illegal underground operation. Selim and Osmin are dressed as and behave like gangsters, and for the most part criminal gangs run the illegal tier of the sex trade in Germany. Belmonte and Pedrillo’s massacre of the prostitutes, patrons, and pimps in Selim’s brothel may be seen to evoke the violence that goes on between rival gangs in Germany’s red-light districts. And yet other elements of this production suggest this is a legal brothel, including types of advertisement typical to German brothels at the time. Bieito’s set contains scrolling signs listing services offered by the sex workers inside and the glass boxes evoke window prostitution, which occurs in several German red-light districts.26 The supernumerary sex workers, when their employers are not subjecting them to violence, go about their work relatively cheerfully. Their stage business is characterized by sassiness and humor. In short, their behavior easily leads a spectator to believe they are working by choice. This stands in stark contrast to the behavior of Konstanze and Blonde, who we know have been kidnapped and are being held against their will. It is hard to reconcile all the disparate elements of Bieito’s brothel. This is a brothel that advertises, and so is presumably a legal one, but it is also a brothel in which uncooperative trafficking victims are leashed and held in cages, and in which any woman might be spontaneously murdered as a show of power.27

I do not mean to suggest that legal brothels never feature violence or exploit women, but this kind of representational blurriness between sex work Page 100 →and sex trafficking risks conflating the two in a troubling way, especially with regard to the agency of the women in Bieito’s production. Prohibitionist feminists argue that sex work is necessarily violent and reinforces a system of patriarchal dominance, and that consent in relation to sex work is impossible.Entführung are examples of this model in action. These are women who are completely without power, who are unable to give or withhold consent, and who are treated literally as objects that the men can use to experience pleasure, make money, and demonstrate their power to others. Maybe the unnamed sex workers in this production are trafficking victims, like Konstanze and Blonde seem to be, and they behave cheerfully around the boss as a means of self-preservation. Or maybe this is an illegal brothel featuring both trafficking victims being held against their will (Konstanze and Blonde) and migrant sex workers who are choosing to work but are not recognized by the legal system (the supernumerary sex workers). Maybe the trappings of advertisements around the set are simple tools to aid the audience in identifying the setting as a brothel and are not meant to signify legality at all. The point is, Bieito’s representation of the sex trade in this production is confusing and at times self-contradictory. I fear the production plays into the cultural idea that sex workers are necessarily victims of coercion and abuse, and it may suggest that the very specific horrors we witness are indispensable to any system of sex work.

Agency and the Absence of Violence

Then COC Artistic Director Alexander Neef introduced Mouawad’s staging in his own note in the program. But whereas Mouawad’s note focuses on redeeming the portrayal of the East in the opera, Neef wants to promote this production based on its gender politics. He writes that Konstanze prefigures “a more hopeful voice, in so far as she gains what the contemporary writer Rebecca Solnit identifies in her book of essays, Men Explain Things to Me, as a small but essential victory in women’s ongoing struggle for equality: ‘The ability to tell your own story.’”Entführung “very much through a feminist lens” and that he allowed for her character to be “an actual human being.”38

Mouawad certainly amplifies Konstanze’s and Blonde’s narrative voices in his production; he writes a great deal of new dialogue for them and much of the action of the original opera is inflected as a story they are telling Belmonte and Pedrillo. Yet centering the women’s voices does not necessarily empower them. As a general rule in this production, Mouawad eliminates or dials down the violence against Konstanze and Blonde in the service of Page 105 →redeeming their captors. But the way that he removes the violence, and what takes its place, is important.

Selim and Konstanze’s first scene together, built around her aria “Ach, ich liebte,” bears little resemblance to the same scene in Bieito’s production. Mouawad’s Selim is soft spoken and gentle. He pleads with Konstanze to share the source of her unhappiness with him and when she resists, he assures her that he loves her. Raphael Weinstock’s performance encourages us to believe him. Konstanze sings about missing Belmonte, but her affections are obviously split; Selim rests his head in her lap, and she strokes his hair for a time before abruptly stopping herself and standing up. She tells him in the following dialogue, “I never dreamed my heart would be so torn. Your two faces meld into one another. You are powerful, brilliant, and generous as no other man. He exudes innocence and youth. You make me tremble, while he makes my heart beat faster.”39 Mouawad allows a glimmer of Selim’s domineering side to come through in this scene, but it is tempered with an insistence that his behavior is not entirely unreasonable. He tells Konstanze, “I couldn’t bear seeing you turn to another. Not that. What man wouldn’t say that about the woman he loves madly?”40 Even when Selim explicitly threatens her with forced marriage (and its implied consummation), the larger context of Mouawad’s new dialogue seems to ask, what man wouldn’t? At one point when Konstanze resists Selim’s advances, he suddenly asks her, “Do you think your world is better than mine?”41 Konstanze’s struggle against his attempt at forced marriage and rape is thus reframed as a question of East versus West. Mouawad recasts Konstanze’s interest in protecting her bodily autonomy from her captor as a colonialist disdain for Eastern cultures. Mouawad’s goal is to humanize the Muslim men in this opera, but a side effect of that humanization is to quietly excuse the misogyny that fuels these men’s speech. Again and again, the new dialogue encourages us to sympathize with Selim even as he threatens to torture and rape Konstanze.

In Blonde and Osmin’s scenes together, we are encouraged not to take their words at face value in order to humanize and redeem Osmin. Mouawad’s dialogue encourages us to see Blonde’s relationship with her captor as parallel to her relationship with Pedrillo. Before her first aria, “Durch Zärtlichkeit und Schmeicheln,” Blonde wonders, “Why do I always fall for infantile men who never stop complaining?”Page 106 →attract the good-for-nothings? Get it into your head that I don’t like this. I’m telling you Pedrillo, as I told Osmin. Do you think you’re dealing with a slave who, trembling, obeys your every command? I’ll never fulfill that fantasy of yours.”43 Blonde makes the literal slavery of the seraglio indistinguishable from the figurative slavery of being a woman in misogynistic eighteenth-century Europe. When she finishes her aria about how to properly treat a woman, Osmin scornfully speaks his words from the original libretto: “Tenderness and flattery? We’re in Turkey! I’m the master, you’re my slave. I command, you obey.”44 Mouawad adds an aside from Pedrillo, who is listening in from the present and laughing: “It’s the same in Europe!”45

In service of this equation of Pedrillo’s and Osmin’s relationships to Blonde, Mouawad goes out of his way to make Osmin as endearing as possible and Pedrillo a violent boor. The duet between Osmin and Blonde, “Ich gehe, doch rate ich dir,” becomes a playful quarrel between lovers that builds up to the reveal to the audience that Blonde is pregnant. At the point in the text where Blonde threatens to scratch Osmin’s eyes out, the pair roll around the stage giggling and cuddling. The light, jolly, buffa music is not entirely out of place for this staging of the duet, but the words of the libretto become entirely meaningless—Blonde’s resistance is nullified. Pedrillo and Blonde’s interactions in contrast are steeped in threats and mockery even when none are present in the original libretto. At one point, Pedrillo warns Blonde, “Be quiet or I’ll behave like a Turk!”Entführung typically locates in Osmin and “Turkishness.”

The vast majority of the new dialogue written for Konstanze and Blonde in this production serves to defend the characters of the men who hold them captive. One exception to this is in a brief conversation between the two women after Konstanze’s aria “Welcher Wechsel.” They only exchange a few lines, but it is the only scene they have alone together. It is notable that while in the original libretto they daydream about Belmonte and rescue, here they do not talk about the men at all. Still, their relationship is challenging to read in the midst of the contemporary value system of Mouawad’s production, because while the women may behave as friends, Blonde is Konstanze’s servant. In “Durch Zärtlichkeit,” we see Blonde thinking through the figurative slavery of being a woman—and specifically a lower-class woman—in Enlightened Europe by equating her relationships with Pedrillo and Osmin. But she does not direct any of this revolutionary attitude toward her mistress. Page 107 →Instead, Blonde comforts Konstanze, who is having a harder time adjusting to life in the seraglio by telling her, “I’ve often experienced exile. Changing countries and languages becomes an advantage in the long run, an identity.”47 Konstanze expresses envy for Blonde’s courage, and Blonde jokingly suggests that they should change places before telling Konstanze, “Who understands me better than you, and you, better than me? We were mistress and servant, now we’re two women, side by side.”48 This female camaraderie initially has a sheen of empowerment, but it quickly corrupts under scrutiny. This new equality that Blonde feels is possible in the seraglio because the class distance between them has dissolved, but it has dissolved because now they are both slaves. Mouawad romanticizes their captivity, first by having Blonde express gratitude for the learning experience, then by casting it as the catalyst to bring these two women together in a way that would have been impossible while they still had their freedom.

Like Bieito’s Entführung, Mouawad’s also offers a critique of the rescue genre. Bieito accomplishes this goal by revealing the hero to be no different than the villain at the opera’s conclusion when Belmonte takes ownership of the brothel and leaves Konstanze very much un-rescued. Mouawad’s critique is more subtle and hinges on the idea that the women did not necessarily need rescuing in the first place. His representation of Belmonte indicates that the rescue storyline is more about the ego of the hero than the needs of the damsel. During his aria, “Wenn der Freude Thränen fliessen,” Belmonte sings about the joy of being reunited with his lover, but he addresses the entire aria to the audience and fails to interact with or even make eye contact with Konstanze who is onstage with him. In contrast to Belmonte’s self-serving heroism is the behavior of the Muslim men. Mouawad gives the final line of dialogue in the opera to Selim, who tells Osmin, “Love your Blonde more than anything else and let her go.”49 So, ultimately, it is the Turkish men who prove themselves actually capable of selfless action to benefit the women they love, in contrast to Belmonte and Pedrillo, whose clueless callousness in the prologue is the impetus for the entire action of the opera. Bieito’s rescue critique generates sympathy for the women who have been failed by the false heroics of their lovers, whereas Mouawad’s generates sympathy for the women’s captors, whom he assures us are the real heroes of this story once we get past our Western bias.

The problem with Mouawad’s approach is best encapsulated in one of his added dialogue scenes after the lovers’ quartet, in which the men question the women about their faithfulness:

At first, this is a strong criticism of the written text; Konstanze and Blonde point out the false virtue of the men who only want to rescue them from slavery under certain conditions. But Blonde goes on to tell Pedrillo, “Two years sleeping in the same house with a man who did nothing but seduce me and win me over, offering me gift after gift, making me the queen over everything, over his life, what did you want me to do?”51 She is arguing here that she had no choice but to give in to Osmin’s seduction, but Mouawad combines coercion and imprisonment with Blonde’s tender feelings for Osmin. She had sex with him both because she could not effectively resist him any longer as her captor and because he made her happy. I think Mouawad is wrong to try to have this both ways. As a slave, Blonde cannot consent to sex with her master.

This issue of sex and romance with one’s captor constitutes the central problem with Mouawad’s concept in this production. It is difficult to accept Konstanze and Blonde’s respective tender feelings for Selim and Osmin as real love blossoming across cultural borders when it looks so much more like Stockholm syndrome. Stockholm syndrome refers to a condition in which captives develop an emotional bond with their captors. The name was coined by the media in coverage of a bank robbery in Stockholm in 1973, in which four hostages held by the robbers defended their captors and refused to testify against them in court after being liberated. While not a medically accepted psychological disorder, Stockholm syndrome is widely familiar to the public in part thanks to its frequent occurrence as a trope in television and film. I recognize this trope in Mouawad’s Entführung in the way this production romanticizes the captivity of the women and works hard to stoke compassion for their captors. A part of this problem lies in Stephanie’s libretto. When Selim first asks Konstanze to give herself to him, she replies, “most generous man! If only I could.”Page 109 →than contempt for Osmin. Bieito’s production is worth consideration here as a counterpoint. His staging highlights the ways in which Selim manipulates Konstanze’s emotions to keep her under his control. The scene in which Konstanze stops Selim from strangling himself lays bare the extent of Selim’s emotional manipulation. This scene casts the rest of the tender things Konstanze says to Selim in a new light. Bieito’s Selim is severely unbalanced, and Konstanze says what she needs to say to keep herself alive and her hands free of his blood. Mouawad has us take Konstanze at her word when she speaks Stephanie’s tender words to Selim, but Bieito’s production encourages us to read this element of Konstanze’s speech as either manipulation by Selim or self-preservation—that is, in the context of abuse.

The strength of Mouawad’s production lies in its commitment to updating the opera’s representation of Islam. The aforementioned prayer session that Selim retreats to takes place onstage directly following intermission. Before Mozart’s music resumes, a cantor—in Toronto, Iraqi actor/musician Ahmed Moneka—leads a group of the inhabitants of the seraglio, including Blonde Page 110 →and Pedrillo, in prayer. Mouawad brings a greater sense of realism to Entführung’s representation of Islam by introducing elements of actual religious practice. But this more sensitive and informed depiction of religion can do little to address the problem of generalization in this depiction of the East. In Entführung, as in so many Orientalist representations, ethnicity, geography, and religion are conflated to create a generalized monolithic other in relation to the West.Entführung was never really about Turkey, its people, or its religions. You can’t take the Orientalism out of Entführung because without Orientalism there is no story left. The central conflict between the Orientalist other and the West presents a significant obstacle to reparative representation.

In Entführung’s written text, there are no women in the seraglio besides Konstanze and Blonde, but both Bieito and Mouawad populate their stages with supernumerary women. For Bieito, these women are sex workers or maybe other captives, and for Mouawad they are presumably Turkish women living in the seraglio. None of these women speak or have any meaningful impact on the action—except, for Bieito, when they are the victims of rape and murder—but they are there, visible in the background through Page 111 →much of the opera. Both of these groups of seraglio women move cheerfully through their daily tasks of emotional labor for the men of the seraglio. The sex workers in Bieito’s production pleasure their customers and stroke Osmin’s ego (among other things). The women in Mouawad’s production teach their children and comfort Konstanze when she is struggling with her relationship with Selim.54 Despite extensive additions and alterations to the dialogue scenes in the written text, neither director gives these background women anything to say.55 For Mouawad in particular, these women stand out to me as a potential antidote to the male-dominated politics of cultural representation in this production. Their intersectional identities could have had great power in a reparative retelling of this story. Instead, what we get are the silent figures of women who represent not only a missed opportunity but still another reminder of the ways gendered representation feels like an afterthought in this production.56

In the best cases, inventive reimagining of Orientalist works can illuminate not only the racism within these works but also racism in our contemporary culture. Anne Bogart’s Bessie Award-winning South Pacific in 1984 moves the action to a rehabilitation clinic for veterans with PTSD. Bogart’s approach shares similarities with Mouawad’s in Entführung; while Rodgers and Hammerstein’s numbers appear in order and without alteration, the narrative that connects them casts these numbers in a very different light. More recently, in 2017, New York’s Heartbeat Opera produced a revised and trimmed version of Madama Butterfly called Butterfly. Like Bogart, director Ethan Heard removes the opera from its romantic exotic locale, which allows him to tell the story of a modern Asian woman and to avoid what he calls the fetishistic desire of audiences to witness Butterfly’s ritual suicide.57 GenEnCo’s The Mikado: Reclaimed, produced in Austin in 2016 and directed by kt shorb, uses music from The Mikado to tell a story about Japanese internment. This sampling of productions share a willingness to alter the written text to support their critical projects. This type of work has been largely carried out in smaller opera and musical theater companies. I hope that future years will see an increased willingness of larger companies to entertain productions that make significant intervention at the level of the written text. In the absence of such intervention, I feel it is time for opera companies to take a step back from some of these works.58

• • •

Entführung’s written text, but both create other representational problems in the process. The tension between the source material and the directors’ concepts persists, and both of these productions feature some deeply flawed representations of women and of Turkey and Turkishness despite their reparative and critical aims.

When it comes to sexual violence, Bieito’s and Mouawad’s opposite approaches to the violence in the written text of Entführung can teach us something about the value of recognizing sexual violence even (or especially) when it is uncomfortable to do so. In the introduction to their essay collection, Rape and Representation, Lynn Higgins and Brenda Silver point out the simultaneous pervasiveness and invisibility of rape as a theme in our cultural texts. They suggest that therefore, for feminist critics:

The act of reading rape . . . requires restoring rape to the literal, to the body: restoring, that is, the violence—the physical, sexual violation. The insistence on taking rape literally often necessitates a conscious critical act of reading the violence and the sexuality back into texts where is has been deflected, either by the text itself or by the critics: where it has been turned into a metaphor or a symbol or represented rhetorically as titillation, persuasion, ravishment, seduction, or desire.59

In the written text of Entführung, the sexual violence implicit in the scenario is made invisible by Selim’s gentle entreaties to Konstanze, Blonde’s good humor, the cheerful musical character, and a performance history that rarely challenges the opera’s status as a charming—if a touch outdated—romp.

Bieito excavates Entführung’s invisible violence and holds it up for scrutiny. But the good that his production does in making this sexual violence visible is tempered by the specific ways in which he stages that violence. He objectifies the bodies of supernumerary sex workers. While the silent and exposed bodies of these women function in part as a criticism of the sex trade, they are also props to dress Bieito’s stage. By contrast, Mouawad’s stage action and additions to the libretto further the project of burying and Page 113 →abstracting the sexual violence of this story. To use Higgins’s and Silver’s language above, Mouawad masks the sexual violence through rhetorics of persuasion and desire.

As challenging and as flawed as Bieito’s production is, I find his approach to the sexual violence in this story more compelling and more useful than Mouawad’s. These productions stand as a pair of exemplars that demonstrate, perhaps counterintuitively, that putting less violence against women on stage is not necessarily the more feminist choice in staging the opera canon. Despite the risks of Bieito’s production in terms of the potential for objectifying women’s bodies and reveling in explicit sexualized violence, it forces us to confront the problems that already exist in Entführung and in our contemporary culture. I don’t think the erasure of sexual violence in productions of works from the past is always or necessarily a bad thing. My main criticism of Mouawad’s production in this regard is that it doesn’t actually erase the sexual violence. If Mouawad—or, more likely, his producing companies—had been willing to make alterations to the opera’s written text and not just additions to it, I would have been much more open to this story about cultural negotiation and bias. If the goal of this production is to recast the European men’s objections as ignorance and racism, then remove the other legitimate motivations for them to distrust the Turkish characters, namely their very real capture of and threats against Konstanze and Blonde.

These two productions outline an overarching tension observable in this book between a particular European Regie culture that trades in shock and outrage and an Anglo-American culture concerned with the politics of representation in art works.Entführung, he has done so in a way that anesthetizes the drama of the story and reinforces some of the opera’s most troubling content.

Entführung can be a difficult opera for modern audiences, and I think that it should be. In this story, the women are reduced to merely a “site of transaction” between men, per Teresa de Lauretis, and by extension a site of transaction between cultures.Page 114 →depiction of Selim, who stands apart from his brutish counterpart Osmin because he has been civilized by Enlightenment ideals. And it is a story whose tension arises from the constant, implicit threat of rape. Bieito and Mouawad both attempt to critique elements of the written text of this opera, but ultimately neither critique is entirely coherent. Entführung’s problems of misogyny and Islamophobia look different in these two productions, but in neither have they been solved despite extensive rewrites. To approach staging Entführung from a place of critique is, I believe, the best option if this opera continues to be programmed. And both Bieito and Mouawad have made valuable contributions to the performance history of this work through their efforts. Yet ultimately, I am not convinced that the written text of this opera will allow for a coherent, ethically defensible stage interpretation without significant alterations to the musical numbers in addition to the spoken dialogue. I am a great proponent of critical staging as an approach to challenging repertoire, but Entführung in particular simply may not be salvageable. It is a residue of the eighteenth-century Turkish opera fad that has lingered for as long as it has despite changing cultural sensibilities due to the canonicity of its composer. But its outmoded representations of gender, of violence, and of Turkishness chafe more and more as concerns about ethical representation come increasingly to the forefront of criticism and reception. Perhaps it is time to let this one go.