Gender and Orientalism in Mozart's Entführung aus dem Serail
Nina Suter
Trinity College Dublin
First place winner of the 2021 CHMHE Undergraduate Prize
Nina Suter is a Swiss national currently studying for a master’s degree in English Literature & Linguistics and Musicology at the University of Zurich. After finishing her bilingual second-level education in Switzerland, she started her undergraduate studies in Music and English Literature at Trinity College Dublin, where she was the 2016 recipient of the Taylor Entrance Exhibition Award. From 2018 to 2019, Suter was an intern at Irish National Opera and deputy editor of the student publication Writings About Music, in which she published the essay “The Diva in Alban Berg’s Lulu: Woman Envoiced”. Suter was appointed conductor of the Campanile Consort in 2019 and finished her studies at Trinity College in 2020. Her undergraduate dissertation, “Gender and Orientalism in Mozart’s Entführung aus dem Serail”, won first prize in the CHMHE Undergraduate Musicology Competition, and she further received the Geoffrey Singleton Prize in Music and the Stewart and Proud Prize.
This paper gives an insight into my undergraduate dissertation on the structurally oppressed characters in Mozart’s Entführung aus dem Serail, the orientalised “Turkish” figures Osmin and Selim, and the European women, Blonde and Konstanze. The focus of this paper lies on the inner narrative of the Singspiel’s two narrative arches, the test of fidelity, which placates cultural anxieties around female constancy specific to Josephinian Vienna. This is not only complicated by eighteenth-century sexual and gendered constructs of an intertwined femininity and morality, but also by the interpolation of race and exoticism in the test, which imbues it with an Orientalist theme. Distinguished by social class and Blonde’s emancipatory sense of Enlightenment, the women are complex figures, both musically and dramatically. Even though ultimately Konstanze confirms, and Blonde conforms to the opera’s oppressive central virtue, they also undermine and, in the case of Blonde, subvert eighteenth-century expectations of femininity.