Great Britain’s leading theatre designer from the early 1930s to the mid 1950s, Oliver Messel (1904-1978) won international acclaim for his lavish, painterly and poetic designs informed by period styles. His work spans ballet, drama, film, musical, opera and revue. Messel’s traditional style of theatre design became unfashionable from the mid 1950s onwards, and he increasingly concentrated on painting, interior and textile design, including designing luxury homes in the Caribbean.

Mozart’s comic opera The Abduction from the Seraglio was one of four Mozart operas performed at Glyndebourne in 1956 to celebrate the bi-centenary of his birth. Messel’s exuberant designs are inspired by eighteenth century Western European art and design and its fascination for the Orient, in harmony with the spirit of Mozart’s opera.

The proscenium arch was a piece of illusionistic scenery which acted as a frame for the set in traditional theatre. Messel’s design for the arch features decorative wreaths, lattice decoration and round arches, complementing the eighteenth century Orientalist designs of the set. Messel also created numerous scaled drawings of the arch on tracing paper, but he wrote on this design that the 'arch is better shown here'.