"By the Beard of the Prophet": The Turk in Mozart's Vienna
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2020
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Haverford College. Department of History
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Award
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
In the eighteenth century, the Turk appeared frequently as a subject in European art and literature. Turquerie—a fashion for Turkish styles and aesthetics—influenced the paintings, costumes, architecture, and music of the era, and travel literature provided detailed descriptions of the Ottoman realms. These depictions, though, were rarely objective. Artists and authors carried certain assumptions about Turkish culture and government, and often used the Turk for rhetorical or allegorical purposes. In Vienna, the capital of the Austrian Hapsburg Empire, the Turk was cast as a subject and perpetuator of despotism. Austrian productions mocked and vilified the Turk, attacking the cultural and political institutions that supposedly supported this despotism. In doing so, writers and artists supported Enlightened Europeans as the contrast to despotic Turks. European ideas of religion, governance, and love were celebrated as less oppressive and therefore superior to their Turkish counterparts. Thus, artists and writers lent cultural aid to the Austrian Emperor Joseph II's attempts at Enlightened political reform. As this cultural project unfolded, the young composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart arrived in Vienna, and composed an opera centered around the Turk. His 1782 Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) incorporated conceptions of the Turk from Viennese literature and other operas, and brought them to the stage of the Burgtheater. In that theater, a newly-developed public audience witnessed Mozart's work. The opera's plot focuses on a European nobleman and his servant attempting to rescue their beloveds from the seraglio of the Turkish Pasha Selim. The conflicts between Europe and Turkey, and Enlightenment and despotism are central to the action and drama of the story, and Mozart incorporated these conflicts into the spoken dialogue and musical language of the opera. At the piece's finale, the Pasha surrenders to Enlightened ideals, transforming from villain to hero and earning the praise of the orchestra, singers, and audience. Through the plot, dialogue, and music of the opera, Mozart continued the narrative of Enlightenment triumphing over despotism, and supported Joseph II's image as an Enlightened monarch.