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  • The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon by Larry Wolff
  • Jane Hathaway
Larry Wolff, The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. xii, 490 pp. $29.95 US (cloth).

Engagingly written and judiciously illustrated, The Singing Turk follows the evolution of Ottoman themes in Italian, German, and French opera during the long eighteenth century (roughly 1680–1820). Larry Wolff is not a musicologist but a distinguished historian of the Habsburg Empire and a serious opera-lover. His study draws on a wide range of primary sources in German, Italian, and French, in addition to an impressive array of secondary studies on opera, early modern European history, and Ottoman history.

For Europe's opera-consuming elite, Turks, more specifically Ottoman rulers, offered a not entirely alien mirror through which European political and cultural conventions could be scrutinized and critiqued. Wolff demonstrates that such figures began to appear in European operas just as the Ottoman Empire was beginning to suffer serious military defeats at the hands of the Habsburg Empire and Venice, although he perhaps underplays the danger that the Ottomans continued to pose to Venice and the Habsburgs before about 1740. Now that the Ottomans were no longer an existential threat, European composers and librettists were free to treat them sympathetically and even comically in their operas. Indeed, the commander of the failed 1683 siege of Vienna became the first singing Turk on European stages.

Nonetheless, the ubiquitous Ottoman operatic character in the early eighteenth century was Bayezid I, who was defeated and captured by Tamerlane in 1402. The sultan's captivity and ultimate suicide were the subject of countless opera and theatre pieces throughout Europe, culminating in George Frederic Handel's 1724 Tamerlano. All these works portrayed Bayezid as a noble, tragic figure, who provided a cautionary tale for evolving European absolutism.

In the wake of the 1718 Treaty of Passarowitz, peaceful diplomatic and economic exchanges multiplied between the Ottomans and the European powers. Operas of this period—by Christoph Willibald Gluck, Joseph Haydn, and lesser composers—reflect a new familiarity with Turks and Turkish fashions, featuring percussive Janissary music and comic takes on Ottoman dervishes, pilgrims, and slave traders. These works paved the way for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's 1782 The Abduction from the Seraglio, which offered the ultimate emotionally out-of-control Turkish boor, in the form of the harem guardian Osmin, and the ultimate generous Turk, in the (non-singing) form of the enlightened Pasha Selim. Like the captive [End Page 165] Bayezid, Selim and his operatic forerunners held a mirror up to the European rulers of the time, enlightened absolutists such as Joseph II and Louis XV.

Italian and German operas before the 1790s reflected the constant threat of armed conflict, particularly in the Triplex Confinium, the point in Croatia where Habsburg, Venetian, and Ottoman territories met. In contrast, France enjoyed favorable relations with the Ottomans before Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798. Accordingly, French opera composers treated The Turk somewhat differently, de-emphasizing the clash of cultures and stressing internal curiosities, notably the sultan's harem—although the pièce de resistance of Turkish-themed operas in Ancien Régime France was André Grétry's 1783 La caravane du Caire, in which the Muslim wife of a Frenchman is sold to a generous Turk who frees her. Wolff could perhaps have done more to elucidate how the distinctive trajectory of French theatrical and operatic conventions contributed to this difference.

The transformations wrought by the Napoleonic wars and the Habsburg restoration, Wolff shows, find expression in the operas of Gioachino Rossini. For Rossini, perhaps even more than earlier opera composers, The Turk functioned as a social and political mirror that reflected multiple images. His audiences recognized L'italiana in Algeri's (1813) Mustafa as a comic indictment of the supposedly backward male of post-Napoleonic Italy. In contrast, his 1820 dramatic opera Maometto II can be read as evoking either the Greek rebellion against Ottoman rule or Napoleonically...

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