In ornithological terms, Tobias Hoheisel, director and designer of Scottish Opera's forthcoming Seraglio, looks lankily like a heron or even - thanks to his big round glasses - an owl. You could imagine him playing Papageno in some quirky modern staging of The Magic Flute. How he and his co-director, Imogen Kogge, will deal with Mozart's Turkish comedy remains to be seen; but, he declares refreshingly, they won't be concentrating on sight-gags, on turbans and funny clothes, as happens so often in other productions of this eternally difficult work.

Speaking between rehearsals in Glasgow last week, he extolled the basic seriousness of Mozart's first Viennese masterpiece. It is an aspect many directors suppress in order to bring out the jokes, whereby Seraglio is presented, to its detriment, as a sort of Carry On Up the Bosphorus. It is not the Turkishness of the music, vibrant and scintillating though it is, but the eloquent strains of clarinet and basset horn, inspired by Mozart's new Viennese friend and exponent of these instruments, Anton Stadler, which help to make it the profound experience it is, just as they also do the big B flat wind serenade of the same period.

But since, for all its sumptuous beauty and superb succession of arias, Seraglio has never been the world's favourite Mozart opera, you can see why directors feel the need to decorate it with slapstick, making it more of a children's pantomime than the product of the European enlightenment it really is. In this respect, Hoheisel and Kogge surely have their priorities right. It is the opera's message that matters, and if the results prove short of fripperies, they will be all the more truthful to their subject.

Scottish Opera's flirtations with Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail - to give Seraglio its wordy German title, usually translated as The Abduction from the Harem - have been shorter and less frequent than with The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi Fan Tutte and The Magic Flute, Mozart's later, more famous comedies. But as most of these productions have seemed like desperate attempts to surpass the memorable (and, in the case of Cosi, unsurpassable) originals of the works during the company's early years, Seraglio has had, in keeping with its plot, what may seem a lucky escape.

But then, in Seraglio's case, there has been no indelible original production to act as benchmark. The company's first shot at it in 1963 was no more than a cautious step into the perils of Mozartian waters. The second, from the vanguard hands of David Pountney, was altogether bolder, in that it interpolated poetic words from Pushkin into Gottlieb Stephanie's unpoetic German libretto, and proposed that the heroine Constanze was more than half in love with the romantic Pasha who had kidnapped her.

But even that was 30 years ago, and in the new millennium a fresh approach to this masterpiece of the enlightenment has been overdue. With a pair of German directors, the latest production of the world's first great German opera will be - as Hoheisel and Kogge have put it - the product of "four eyes and four ears".

In saying this, they might have remembered that the conductor, Jeremy Carnall, will increase the quantity to six, but today such niceties tend to go unmentioned. We should be grateful, at least, that they recognise Seraglio as an "incredibly wonderful" piece, which nobody should write off as "light".

In this respect, their response to it is reassuring. For Hoheisel, the work is a gallery of rounded characters, none of them strictly comic. Nor is the Turkish side simply an opportunity for fun - it is not, he says, a holiday island on which the action takes place, but somewhere representing what he defines as "the other". The Pasha, on discovering Belmonte to be the son of his worst enemy, does not have him officially strangled but sets him free. Here, as Mozart intended, is the voice of the enlightenment.

As a director whose previous experience has included The Magic Flute at Santa Fe, a Janacek trilogy at Glyndebourne and Pfitzner's Palestrina at Covent Garden, Hoheisel is not ignorant of the human predicaments from which great opera composers draw inspiration. Before we closed, I quoted an illuminating line from David Cairns's recent book on Mozart's operas, which says that the more you study Seraglio the more you find in it.

Hoheisel, who designed his first Seraglio 20 years ago in Aachen, nodded agreement. It's something, admittedly, that could be said of all Mozart's great operas but, as Cairns points out, the note of forgiveness and reconciliation on which Seraglio ends is very special, because it resounds with echoes of the composer's own life.

Let's hope that everyone, audience as well as performers, savours the point.

Scottish Opera's production of Seraglio opens at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, on October 19.