You’ve probably heard us going on about how Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born 250 years ago. Yesterday, to be exact. And where else would you have found us last night but listening to Mozart’s music? As we recommended in last week’s Classical Music Agenda, we spent the big night with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center. This week, they are presenting a semi-staged performance of Mozart’s early opera, The Abduction from the Seraglio (1782), with television personality Sam Donaldson in the non-singing role of the Pasha Selim. Abduction is the first Viennese example of the operatic genius that the composer would later develop, reaching its full flower in The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte. The story was set in a pasha’s harem in Turkey, a country with whom the Austrian empire was increasingly in conflict politically, leading up to a disastrous war toward the end of Mozart’s life. Two Spanish women are enslaved by the pasha, and the men who love them come from Spain to help them escape.

If you are not a regular classical music listener, you might wonder what all the fuss is about. Why do we care so much about Mozart? We had occasion to give this some thought last night as we listened to this charming opera, far down the list of his best work and yet still filled with moments of remarkable beauty. The appeal of Mozart’s music is undeniably universal, the musical equivalent of chocolate-covered strawberries, something that just about everyone will love. However, the delight of the surface is only the sweet aroma that draws you in, toward the substantial ideas that are underneath, profound without the least air of forbidding seriousness. Americans may be the most disposed to appreciate Mozart’s political ideas, expressing as they do the Enlightenment goal of moderating absolute government toward greater personal freedom. Many of Mozart’s operas have ultimately to do with noble rulers who restrain their own autocratic powers out of love for their subjects, the ideal of the enlightened monarch. Pasha Selim in Abduction, the Count in Figaro, Titus in La Clemenza di Tito, Sarastro in The Magic Flute, and even the title role in the early Lucio Silla all either learn or teach us a lesson about forgiveness and mercy in the hands of the powerful. Of course, we Americans in the 21st century cannot really identify with the idea of an executive leader, seemingly drunk on power, who imposes his own will on a country while ignoring the needs and desires of a large percentage of its citizens. Oh, wait.