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 18th-century Western European art and design and its fascination with the Ottoman Empire, in harmony with the light-hearted spirit of Mozart’s opera.

Messel borrowed motifs from engravings of Turkish buildings and Asian-style pavilions depicted in English tapestries and on Meissen porcelain for the architecture of Selim’s palace and garden. He used painted acetate to create an effect of intricate lattice work. The platform features a palm tree, parasol and cushions, indicating the exotic location and air of indolent luxury in the palace garden on the Turkish coast.