J.G. Sulzer's three levels of comedy in Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail
Date
2003
Authors
Dyck, Tanya Lynne
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Abstract
This thesis examines the use of comedy in Mozart's Die Entfiihrung aus dem Sera ii, a Singspiel composed in Vienna in 1781-1782. It uses as its conceptual base the definition of comedy by the eighteenth-century theorist Johann Georg Sulzer (1720-1779), as found in the third edition of his Allgemeine Theorie der schonen Kiinste (1792-1794). In this German treatise on aesthetics, Sulzer presents a three-fold definition of the comic that provides a valuable tool for examining the emerging German Singspiel. The "low comic" involves the absurd, the farcical, and the ridiculous; the "middle comic" is witty and edifying; and the "high comic" stirs the powerful passions of the soul and moves the listener deeply. Based on Sulzer's definition, this study aims to find evidence of all three classes of comedy in Die Entfiihrung. It concludes that this work and its characters demonstrate an unusually broad range of comedy, ranging from the farcical to the sublime. It also connects comedy with two controversial issues central to the Enlightenment satire: racial and gender bias. It will close with speculations on the role that Mozart's use of these three comic types, either in pure form or as hybrids, may have played in the opera's successful reception in Vienna as well as other German-speaking lands.