Conexiónes laberínticas de la literatura y la música. Una novela picaresca española como fuente del libreto de El rapto en el Serrall

Abstract

 The story of the young captive woman rescued by her artful lover, narrated in W. A. Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio, constitutes an antique literary motif. The Historia de Flores y Blancaflor was the vehicle of its extraordinary diffusion in the Middle Ages and even after the invention of the printing press. A motif is a general matrix that acquires particular features in every play where it is incorporated. Therefore, it is not enough to prove its presence in two plays if we wish to study the relation between them. In order to show whether one play derives from the other one, it is necessary to compare a series of elements. That is the basis of the study of “intertextuality” as systematized by the literary critic G. Genette. This paper applies such methodology to compare the libretto of Mozart’s opera with the Historia de Ozmín y Daraja, a framed story in Mateo Alemán’s picaresque novel Guzmán de Alfarache.