Read an Excerpt
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 STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9965-2
CHAPTER 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. 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.
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. 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.
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 ...
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." 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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
In Rowe's dramatic conception, Bajazet was a tyrant dedicated to war and destruction, while Tamerlane, fundamentally a man of peace, was hailed for having discovered "a nobler way to empire," becoming "Lord of the willing world." That nobler way to empire was supposed to suggest a British way to empire, contrasting with French aggression and militarism, and Rowe's Tamerlane was taken by contemporary audiences as the effigy of the British king William III, hero of the Glorious Revolution, who died in 1702. The play thus became a kind of royal commemoration. It was regularly revived on November 4, for King William's birthday, and on November 5, the anniversary of William's arrival in England in 1688.Tamerlane's victory over Bajazet at the battle of Ankara takes place in the interval between Rowe's first and second acts, which begins with a "Symphony of Warlike Music," according to the stage direction. Even outside the operatic genre the encounter seemed to call for some sort of musical accompaniment.
The Ottoman sultan is indicted in Rowe's drama for making war and practicing political tyranny, but Tamerlane also diagnoses and denounces Bajazet's overweening pride:
Thou vain, rash thing,
That, with gigantic insolence, hast dar'd
To lift thy wretched self above the stars ...
All dramatic and operatic representations of Bajazet would acknowledge his pride, and even in Rowe's very negative conception it was impossible to deny absolutely the sultan's dignity. When Bajazet laments his "loss of sacred honour, the radiancy of majesty eclips'd," there is some echo of Shakespeare's Richard II, with the righteous Tamerlane now looking something like the usurper Bolingbroke. Bajazet in captivity affirms that "death shall free me at once from infamy," but Rowe did not permit him the noble suicide on stage that Handel later composed. Rowe's drama ended instead with Bajazet finally exhausting Tamerlane's goodhearted indulgence and being condemned to a humiliating confinement in the legendary cage.
Pradon's Bajazet of 1676 was not yet unequivocally the tragic hero of the drama, and Rowe's Bajazet of 1701 was far from admirable, but the Ottoman sultan would acquire a more noble character in Piovene's libretto for Gasparini. The conditioning factor of this metamorphosis was decades of warfare, which definitively transformed the Ottoman sultanate from a fearful power in Europe, still aiming to extend its borders at the expense of Christian European states, to a defeated political force capable of arousing in the European public some of the same pity that Tamerlane was supposed to be feeling for Bajazet in Pradon's drama. When the Ottomans were beaten outside Vienna on September 12, 1683, by an army of Christian allies under the supreme command of Polish king Jan Sobieski, there began a whole generation of aggressive Habsburg, Polish, and Venetian wars against the Turks, ending with the peace settlements of Karlowitz in 1699 and Passarowitz in 1718.
The Siege of Vienna and the Captivity of Bajazet
The breaking of the Turkish siege of Vienna in September 1683 was celebrated all over Catholic Europe, and there were fireworks and illuminations in Rome, Madrid, and Bologna, while in Ferrara the Sultan Mehmed IV and the Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa were festively hanged in effigy. In Habsburg Madrid there was a theatrical piece performed in December 1683 with allegorical figures of Fame and Music celebrating the Habsburg dynasty, and by December 1684 the Jesuit College in Vienna presented a drama with music about the reconquest of Spain from the Moors in 1492, thus heralding the reconquest of southeastern Europe from the Ottomans. In 1684 Pope Innocent XI decreed that September 12, the day of the Ottoman defeat and the name day of the Virgin Mary, should always be celebrated on the Catholic calendar throughout Europe. Kara Mustafa became the subject of a popular entertainment at Hernals, near Vienna, where there was established an annual reenactment of a donkey ride representing his humiliating retreat from Vienna, a sort of charivari in which the Grand Vizier was mockingly serenaded with an Austrian imitation of Janissary music in the Turkish style.
Kara Mustafa at the siege of Vienna became an operatic subject in Hamburg in 1686, only three years after the conclusion of the siege. The composer was Johann Wolfgang Franck, the librettist was Lukas von Bostel (later the mayor of Hamburg), and the opera was conceived in two parts: "Der glückliche Gross-Vezier Cara Mustapha" and then, on another night, "Der unglückliche Cara Mustapha." The vizier is "fortunate" (glücklich) only up until the failure of the siege, and then "unfortunate" (unglücklich) as he is promptly executed. The first part of the opera covers the "gruesome siege" of Vienna, while the second part dramatizes the "joyous relief" of the city. Thus, the Ottoman military assault on Vienna was almost immediately reenacted as operatic entertainment in Hamburg, with the Turkish commander as the titular protagonist. Interestingly, the opera has the Turkish Janissaries themselves singing a chorus of celebration when the "tyrant" Kara Mustafa is executed, so that the Turks as well as the Viennese are shown to be liberated by the outcome of the siege and of the opera:
So endet sich Trübsahl und Noth:
Mustapha, der Bluthund ist todt!
So ends distress and need:
Mustafa the bloodhound is dead!
The research of Andrea Sommer-Mathis suggests that the opera was an "extraordinarily great stage success" in Hamburg, not only for its timely staging of the recent crisis but perhaps especially on account of its spectacular theatrical settings of the siege. A related musical work was performed in Venice in 1686 at the theater of San Moisè. The Venetian title compared Kara Mustafa to the excessively powerful Roman officer Sejanus who was executed by Emperor Tiberius: Il Seiano moderno della Tracia overo La caduta dell'ultimo Gran-Visir (The modern Sejanus of Thrace; or, the fall of the recent Grand Vizier).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Singing Turk by Larry Wolff. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
