Full Description
While European powers were at war with the Ottoman Empire for much of the eighteenth century, European opera houses were staging operas featuring singing sultans and pashas surrounded by their musical courts and harems. Mozart wrote The Abduction from the Seraglio. Rossini created a series of works, including The Italian Girl in Algiers. And these are only the best known of a vast repertory. This book explores how these representations of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, the great nemesis of Christian Europe, became so popular in the opera house and what they illustrate about European-Ottoman international relations.
After Christian armies defeated the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683, the Turks no longer seemed as threatening. Europeans increasingly understood that Turkish issues were also European issues, and the political absolutism of the sultan in Istanbul was relevant for thinking about politics in Europe, from the reign of Louis XIV to the age of Napoleon. While Christian European composers and publics recognized that Muslim Turks were, to some degree, different from themselves, this difference was sometimes seen as a matter of exotic costume and setting. The singing Turks of the stage expressed strong political perspectives and human emotions that European audiences could recognize as their own.
Contents
Introduction
1. The Captive Sultan: Operatic Transfigurations of the Ottoman
Menace after the Siege of Vienna
2. The Generous Turk: Captive Christians and Operatic Comedy in Paris
3. The Triumphant Sultana: Suleiman and His Operatic Harem
4. The Turkish Subjects of Gluck and Haydn: Comic Opera in War And Peace
5. Osmin in Vienna: Mozart's Abduction and the Centennial of the Ottoman Siege
6. "To Honor the Emperor": Pasha Selim and Emperor Joseph Ii in the Age of Enlightened Absolutism
7. The Ottoman Adventures of Rossini and Napoleon: Kaimacacchi and Missipipi at La Scala
8. Pappataci and Kaimakan: Reflections in a Mediterranean Mirror
9. An Ottoman Prince in the Romantic Imagination: The Libertine Adventures of Rossini's Turkish Traveler
10. Maometto in Naples and Venice: The Operatic Charisma of the Conqueror
11. Rossini's Siege of Paris: Ottoman Subjects in the French Restoration
12. The Decline and Disappearance of the Singing Turk: Ottoman Reform, the Eastern Question, and the European Operatic Repertory
Conclusion
