Turkish Opera
The Turkish opera was a popular opera genre mainly in the 18th century, with which oriental local color was brought to European stages. The Ottoman Empire under Turkish leadership encompassed Europe in the south and east, so without further differentiation, Turkish was perceived as the epitome of the alluring and threatening foreigner, without distinguishing between Turks, Arabs, Persians or North Africans.
The Turkish opera emerges from the "Turkish tragedy", a widespread genre of baroque drama , which in the 18th century was increasingly connected with the subject of tolerance and international understanding as part of the Enlightenment .
Influences
Musically, the Turkish Opera was inspired by the Janissary music, the military music of the Ottomans. It was the only Turkish music that was known in the West until the 19th century. Jean-Baptiste Lully was inspired for his incidental music for Der Bürger als Edelmann (1673) by a Janissary chapel that had come to Paris with an embassy. After the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683, a Janissary chapel was captured. Its sound with the combination of cymbals, triangles , bells and piccolo was coarse and noisy, for some contemporaries also cheerful, and was easy to recognize.
As far as the subject matter of the libretti was concerned, the Turkish Opera benefited from numerous novels and travelogues published in the 18th century. The older Turkish opera belonged to the court operas , so it was played among nobles, which gave the opportunity to thematize local politics in the guise of exoticism . In the manner of the opera seria , it had a ruling figure as its center, usually a sultan . The most popular main characters were Suleiman the Magnificent , Mehmed II and Bayezid I.
Examples
At that time, the opera text was still considered the main work and not its musical clothing: a libretto that was very often set to music was Tamerlano by Agostino Piovene , which, for example, Georg Friedrich Handel composed for London in 1724 (→ Tamerlano (Handel) ). Johann Adolf Hasses Solimano (1753) presented sumptuous Turkish costumes and elephants on stage at its premiere in Dresden. The libretto of this opera, Solimano by Giovanni Ambrogio Migliavacca , was also set to music by many other composers, in a modified version in 1757 as Solimano by Davide Perez . This type of Italian opera connected the aristocratic courts between Dresden and Lisbon. The Turkish opera around the middle of the 18th century was still used by the local rulers to stage themselves.
From the 1770s onwards it was replaced by operas in the semiseria sector, i.e. by pieces that also have bourgeois characters as heroes and in which dialogues and sung passages are mixed ( opéra comique , singspiel ). In this context, the political theme of the older Turkish opera is replaced by private, interpersonal themes. The Turkish harem thus became the main attraction of the foreign culture. Often it is about the kidnapping of women from the sultan's seraglio , which establishes a relationship to the rescue opera genre . The best known is Mozart's opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1782), but it is related to many similar pieces of the period, including Benedikt Schack's The Beneficent Dervish (1793).
With Angelo Anelli's L'italiana in Algeri , set to music by Luigi Mosca in 1808 and by Gioachino Rossini in 1813 ( Die Italienerin in Algier ), Turkish opera changes to the genre of opera buffa and in the 19th century remains mostly associated with the bogus. The piece of equipment up to the US Extravaganza has in the Turkish opera's origins.
literature
- W. Daniel Wilson: Humanity and ideology of the crusade around 1780. The “Turkish Opera” in the 18th century and the rescue motif in Wieland's “Oberon”, Lessing's “Nathan” and Goethe's “Iphigenie”. Lang, New York et al. 1984, ISBN 0-8204-0146-3 .
- Thomas Betzwieser: Exotism and “Turkish Opera” in the French music of the Ancien Régime. Studies on an Aesthetic Phenomenon. (= Neue Heidelberger Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 21), Laaber, Laaber 1993, ISBN 3-89007-225-9 .
- Andrea Polaschegg: The other orientalism. Rules of German-Oriental Imagination in the 19th Century. de Gruyter, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-11-018495-8 .