The Singing Turk

Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon

Larry Wolff

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780804799652
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire prémoderne

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.

1

THE CAPTIVE SULTAN

Operatic Transfigurations of the Ottoman Menace after the Siege of Vienna

Introduction: Bajazet the Tenor

In 1724, as Handel was completing his opera Tamerlano for performance by the Royal Academy of Music at the King’s Theater in the Haymarket, the Venetian tenor Francesco Borosini arrived in London to star in the opera as Tamerlane’s vanquished enemy, the Ottoman sultan Bajazet. The historical conqueror Timur, or Tamerlane, defeated and captured the historical Bajazet (Bayezid) at the battle of Ankara in 1402. He died in 1403 as Tamerlane’s captive, possibly by suicide as represented in Handel’s opera. This major setback for the Ottomans could only be redressed after Tamerlane’s own death in 1405 during his Chinese campaign, which was followed by an Ottoman resurgence under Bajazet’s son Mehmed I, his grandson Murad II, and his great-grandson Mehmed II, who conquered Constantinople in 1453.

When the tenor Borosini came to England to sing the part of Bajazet for Handel, he was probably carrying with him an operatic score by the composer Francesco Gasparini, a setting of the libretto by the poet and Venetian patrician Agostino Piovene.¹ This was basically the same libretto that Handel would use, though lightly adapted for him by Nicola Francesco Haym. Gasparini’s Tamerlano had been performed in Venice in 1711 and was then significantly revised and revived in Reggio Emilia (near Parma) in 1719 with the prominence of the Ottoman sultan considerably enhanced and the title accordingly changed to Il Bajazet. The revision also allowed the sultan, very dramatically, to poison himself and die on stage. The tenor Borosini had performed the expanded part of Bajazet in Reggio Emilia in 1719, and he therefore had some stake in helping Handel to appreciate the importance of Bajazet’s role.²

Francesco Borosini was the tenor who sang the expanded role of Bajazet in Gasparini’s Il Bajazet in Reggio Emilia in 1719, including Bajazet’s death scene which may have been composed partly according to the tenor’s own conception. He then traveled to London to create the role of Bajazet in Handel’s Tamerlano in 1724. Artist unknown, Wikimedia Commons.

Piovene’s Venetian libretto, originally for Gasparini, would be set to music by some twenty different composers all over Europe during the course of the eighteenth century, alternately titled for Tamerlano or Bajazet. It was still being recomposed for performance in Venice as Bajazette by Gaetano Marinelli as late as 1799, at the century’s end. Piovene’s libretto of 1711, however, was not even the first Venetian version of the subject, as an earlier libretto was composed and performed as Il gran Tamerlano at the Teatro Grimani of the church of San Giovanni e Paolo in 1689. The operatic elaborations of the history of the Ottoman sultan Bajazet thus played out over the course of more than a century in Venice.

Handel in 1724 had the opportunity to tailor the part of Bajazet to Borosini’s tenor skills, as demonstrated in rehearsal, but also to study the Gasparini score in which Borosini’s Turkish character had already been endowed with heroic stature. When Handel’s opera opened, Borosini performed the part of a noble tragic hero, as complex as any that had ever been composed for a tenor on the operatic stage; this was all the more remarkable for the fact that the character was an Ottoman sultan, whose dynastic descendants were still widely regarded as the enemies of Christendom in the early eighteenth century. Borosini himself had to be imported from Venice, because Handel did not have a tenor in his regular company, and he wanted to create a tragic tenor role that would sound particularly striking among the rival leads, the Mongol or Tartar conqueror Tamerlano and the Greek Byzantine prince Andronico, both of them performed by castrati. The figure of Bajazet, especially as conceived for Borosini, became the earliest important incarnation of the singing Turk, and numerous composers and performers would recreate the role, making the sultan sing in captivity through most of the eighteenth century and across much of the European continent.

The Drama of Bajazet in the Seventeenth Century

Operas about Turks emerged as a European phenomenon at the very end of the seventeenth century, after the siege of Vienna. They were, however, anticipated and conditioned by earlier spoken dramas on Ottoman subjects, sometimes with incidental music, and there were even some early instances of musical cantatas for singing Turks. In the mid-seventeenth century the baroque composer Luigi Rossi composed the “Lamento di Mustafà e Bajazet,” a cantata in which two Ottoman princes plead in vain for their lives as they are about to be executed by their brother the sultan, in a classic instance of Ottoman political fratricide. These princes already demonstrated the musical nobility that Gasparini and Handel would invest in the tragic figure of Sultan Bajazet in Tamerlano. Rossi, who received his musical training in Naples and worked principally in Rome, came originally from Torremaggiore in Apulia, on the Adriatic Sea, looking toward the Ottoman empire. In 1656 there was performed in London, under Cromwell’s Protectorate, an opera on The Siege of Rhodes, based on the historical siege by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1522. Jointly composed by several English composers to a libretto by William Davenant, and including Suleiman himself among the singing parts, The Siege of Rhodes was probably the very first British opera—though its music has not survived.³ In France in 1670 Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme was performed for Louis XIV; its exotic Turkish disguises, mock-Turkish ceremonies, and pseudo-Turkish phrases were employed to make a fool out of the titular bourgeois gentleman while also entertaining the king. The work as a whole was classified as a comédie-ballet, and was accompanied with music by Lully, including the musical composition of the Turkish scene.⁴

The Ottoman sultan Bajazet in particular emerged as an important dramatic subject as early as the sixteenth century. Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine came to the Elizabethan stage in the 1580s, with Bajazet presented as a tyrant no less arrogant than Tamerlane himself. Before the great battle, the Ottoman sultan addresses his pashas and Janissaries, and promises not only to defeat Tamerlane but to castrate and humiliate him:

BAJAZET: By Mahomet my kinsman’s sepulchre,

And by the holy Alcoran I swear,

He shall be made a chaste and lustless eunuch,

And in my sarell [seraglio] tend my concubines . . .⁵

It is, however, Tamerlane who wins the battle of arms. He takes Bajazet captive and, according to the conventional tale, imprisons him in a cage. Marlowe’s Tamerlane already imagines Bajazet singing like a caged bird: “If thou wilt have a song, the Turk shall strain his voice.”⁶ Bajazet, however, defiantly commits suicide by battering his skull against the bars of the cage—on stage.

This presentation of Bajazet in Elizabethan drama in the 1580s followed the first major European defeat of the Ottomans in the naval battle of Lepanto in 1571. In the 1590s Shakespeare, in Henry IV, Part 2, had Prince Hal, upon his succession, reassure his brothers:

Brothers, you mix your sadness with some fear:

This is the English, not the Turkish court;

Not Amurath an Amurath succeeds,

But Harry Harry.⁷

Shakespeare meant that Prince Hal would not barbarously put his brothers to death, as a newly enthroned Ottoman sultan might have done.

Marlowe’s Bajazet was as much a barbarian as Tamerlane, and it was not until a century later that French classical drama, in the age of Louis XIV, began to rethink the relation between these two figures, and to reconsider their respective political qualities. Racine’s Bajazet of 1672 concerned a completely different Bajazet, an executed Ottoman prince of the seventeenth century who fell victim to romantic jealousy and political feuding within the sultan’s family and household. The crucial work for provoking operatic interest in the Ottomans was that of Racine’s less successful rival Jacques Pradon, author of the drama Tamerlan, ou la mort de Bajazet in 1676. Pradon believed his play’s lack of success was due to a hostile cabal manipulated by Racine.

In a preface to the play, Pradon clearly stated that he did not intend for Tamerlane to be a mere exemplar of barbarism: “I have made a gentleman [honnête homme] of Tamerlane, contrary to the opinions of some people who would have him be completely brutal.” Tamerlane is therefore capable of looking upon Bajazet in captivity with “a pitying gaze” (un regard pitoyable)—which might also have conditioned the response of the audience.⁸ The representation of his humiliations rendered the sultan sympathetic: In Vienna, also in the 1670s, a set of Flemish tapestries on the theme of Bajazet and Tamerlane was ordered from Antwerp for St. Stephen’s Cathedral, including a tapestry of Bajazet in his cage and another of Tamerlane using the sultan as a stool for mounting a horse.⁹

The problem of Pradon’s play is Bajazet’s sense of his own profound superiority, which leads to his furious defiance and open contempt for Tamerlane, and the utter rejection of the conqueror’s pity. Bajazet, who rhymes “Tartare” with “barbare” in French couplets, insults Tamerlane to his face, as if trying to provoke him to appear openly as a barbarian. It is Tamerlane who ends up speaking with the voice of reason and moderation:

TAMERLANE: Bajazet, modérez cette rage inutile.

Devant moi reprenenz une âme plus tranquille.

Bajazet, moderate this useless rage.

Before me recover a more tranquil spirit.¹⁰

Yet over the course of the opera, Bajazet achieves a stoical resolve and, finally committing suicide, he welcomes his own death:

BAJAZET: Je sens déjà la mort & secourable & prompte,

Qui m’enlève à la vie, & m’arrache à la honte.

I already feel death, helpful and prompt,

Which takes me from life and removes me from shame.¹¹

This tragic and stoical death already suggested the kind of hero Bajazet would become on the operatic stages of the eighteenth century.

English drama returned to Tamerlane more than a century after Marlowe, when Nicholas Rowe presented his play Tamerlane in 1701, just two years after the peace of Karlowitz—but also the same year as the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession. The play’s huge success and constant revival was in fact conditioned by the British war against Louis XIV over the course of the following decade, as the drama became ever more detached from the Ottoman setback that probably conditioned its initial presentation. For Rowe’s characterization of a noble Tamerlane and an impossibly arrogant Bajazet reflected both a very negative view of the Ottoman sultan and, as was generally supposed, a literary conflation of Bajazet with the French king Louis XIV, Britain’s long-standing enemy. A hostile British publication of 1690 made the Turkishness of the French monarch more explicit: The Most Christian Turk; or, A view of the life and bloody reign of Lewis XIV.¹²

In Rowe’s dramatic conception, Bajazet was a tyrant dedicated to war and destructi...