Orientalized Kitsch

The fall of the Roman Empire divided Europe into two halves. The Holy Roman Empire was a political fiction: western and eastern Europe carried on their separate ways of religion, economy, and culture. In the seventeenth century, the expanded Habsburg Empire—with Hungary, Bohemia, and Tyrol—buffered against the possibility of attacks from eastern Europe—the Ottoman Empire, incluincluding Turkey and the Middle East. The frictions opposed the privileges of commerce in the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea, and the religious questions of the Christian and Muslim holy places. Liberty and peace were in everlasting danger of breaking down in a military crisis. This book narrates the history of east-west relations, characterized by bitter hostilities and little tolerance. With the western fascination with eastern life and customs, the struggle with political and religious issues reached a cross-cultural interplay between both cultures.

In 1683, the Turkish Ottoman army laid siege to the city of Vienna. This political crisis was a half-victory for the east because afterwards, the city on the verge of starvation was saved by their western allies. The eastern “crusade” turned into a heroic victory for the west. The Ottomans were not regarded as fabulous figures invented in the realm of human imagination, but rather a “strange” type of cavalry soldiers attired for combat in “turbans, baggy trousers, fur hats, Saracen helmets and armour of the pattern of 500 years ago.” After the battlefields, the new style of orientals—from monstruous beasts to real soldiers—was then made available out of the Ottoman threat to Christendom at the European doorstep. The pure fancy of life in oriental art was found in culture—literature, architecture, calligraphy, carpets, dance, costume, and jewelry. Despite the religious wars of Christendom and Islam, Orientalism in cultural expressions surprised the western world with its near-mythic proliferation and fantastic promiscuity of oriental sweetness.

The great wonder of the Thousand and One Nights or Arabian Nights had been translated from Arabic to French in twelve volumes of Antoine Galland’s Les mille et une nuits (1704–1717) and then retranslated from French into other languages. The tales expressed the sensuous delight of oriental life seen from a female viewpoint, not from the traditional militaristic and barbaric image of war and aggression. The popularized storytelling of the beautiful Sultana Scheherazade is built up to pleasure her tyrant husband, the king of Samarkand. The glitz and glamour of oriental wealth, vegetation, and food had nothing to do with the impoverished life of Eastern men and women confined to the desert. The romantic vision of Arabian Nights was held in low repute by the Muslim code of the Islamic world. Edward Said’s controversial study of Orientalism (1978, with preface 2003) is a political investigation, that represents that in art shows how the western scale of art changed into an artistic paradise of oriental art. Said’s interpretation is followed by Nasser Al-Taee—from the Royal Opera House of Muscat (Sultanate of Oman) and before this, teaching musicology on the School of Music at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Al-Taee is a specialist on the musical analysis of pasticci mediating between eastern and western lyrical music, including the visual scenic arts of opera and film.

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In Representations of the Orient in Western Music, with the subtitle Violence and Sensuality, Al-Taee analyzes the dualities of masculine mood and feminine shade of eastern-western music. He focuses on the fairy tales of the Arabian Nights transferred to the magic and fantasy of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio (1782), Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade (1888), as well as Disney’s film Aladdin (1992). The western artistic imagination had discovered the dramatic imagery not in truth, but rather between reality and romance, highlighting exotic romance. Al-Taee, himself an eastern-western scholar, focuses on the musical art of eighteen-century Austria, nineteenth-century Russia, and twentieth-century America. The...