If this doesn’t catch on: Two female singers and one male singer share 19 roles, while one female musician and two male musicians form a minimalist orchestra with an astonishing richness of sound. Could you imagine something like this at the Semperoper? Maybe. But it takes not only skill but also a touch of positive madness. And in Dresden, you’ll find that especially where the Serkowitz Volksoper is based: at the Saloppe. Here, they dare to do things others shy away from—like remixing Mozart and boldly updating his libretto for today.
The very first lines set the tone: “Here I stand, poor fool that I am, in front of a bratwurst stand—the sausage behind me, me in front of it …”. This has only a distant connection to the comedy writer Christoph Friedrich Bretzner, who wrote the original libretto for *The Abduction from the Seraglio*, and not even a hint of a connection to Goethe. Instead, it has all the more to do with Wolf-Dieter Gööck, who has been reimagining material for the Serkowitz ensemble for years. His adaptation was created as early as 2015 and transposes the encounter between different cultures into a contemporary context without seeming outdated today.
