Larry Wolff is well known to students of European history as a productive intellectual historian and a gifted writer. As a doctoral student, I was deeply inspired by his Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1994). Written in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, Inventing Eastern Europe traced in the writings of Enlightenment philosophers and travelers the origins of west-east dichotomy inside Europe. The following was but one of Wolff's many shrewd observations in Inventing Eastern Europe with reference to Edward Said: “The study of Eastern Europe, like Orientalism, was a style of intellectual mastery, integrating knowledge and power, perpetrating domination and subordination. As in the case of the Orient, so also with Eastern Europe, intellectual discovery and mastery could not be entirely separated from the possibility of real conquest” (8). The Singing Turk, a study of Turkish subjects in European opera during the outburst of baroque operatic dramatization in the long eighteenth century, also contains a reference to Edward Said in the introduction, but this time Wolff cautions his readers with a prudent statement that is also a part of his thesis: “The Singing Turks of the eighteenth century were not simply the manifestations of fantasized, exotic Otherness, produced by imperial projects of mastery, but rather reflected a sense of intimacy, and even identity, between Turks and other Europeans, between the singing subjects and the listening public” (7). He adds on the next page that the Ottoman Empire would be exposed to European colonization as the “Sick Man of Europe” in the age of high Orientalism. Yet, before the advent of that episode, Wolff argues, European opera in the eighteenth century represented the Turk on stage as a member of the European family despite the political division; the difference between the two worlds was “assumed to be fundamentally cosmetic, a matter of costumes and props” (9). This spirit governs the narrative of The Singing Turk, which I would like to get back to at the end of the review.

This is a dense, diligently researched, articulate book about largely forgotten operas from the eighteenth century. Wolff presents painstaking details, but he also insightfully examines composers, musical scores, librettos, the performances of actors and actresses who played in the operas and their use of vocal registers, and similarities and differences across Europe between numerous adaptations of Turkishness as an operatic subject. Readers who are not well versed in musicology might sometimes have difficulty understanding some expressions; a musical glossary would be a helpful addition. Yet the brilliant idea of opening a website (www.singingturk.com) bringing together musical and operatic excerpts for every chapter with brief commentary about each clip raises the status of this work from an academic reading to an operatic experience on its own right. In twelve chapters, the book analyzes the broader meaning communicated to early modern European audiences using Turkish figures, including sultans and sultanas, pashas, and soldiers who took the lead roles in operas. These figures, often males, almost always appeared in the company of a European, typically a female. Composers and librettists imagined various scenarios about how and where the two confronted each other, but most commonly the Turk was the master, while the European was his captive, slave, or concubine. The tension created most commonly by their impossible love but also by their intimacy, deceitfulness, anger, and hatred conveyed to the European public of Enlightenment a lesson about disciplining of emotions, civilizing process, the nature of power in international arena, or the curious relationship between men and women. One of the underlying arguments of the book is that the employment of the Turkish operatic figures in this fashion had become possible only in the second half of the 1680s in the aftermath of the Ottoman defeat in Vienna and the Turkish retreat from Hungary. Having lost the status of an invincible power after the humbling catastrophe in 1683, the fearsome archenemies of past decades could now be approached in nobler terms. Geopolitics were still influential in this new construction in the early eighteenth century: Tragic operas such as Bajezet (Beyazid I) and Tamerlano were more common in Vienna and Venice, two victims of continuous Ottoman threat in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The atmosphere in Paris, however, allowed comedies due to the distance of the Ottoman threat and an assumed alliance between France and the Ottoman Empire. Likewise in Britain, popular theatrical entertainments included sultan and sultana figures who took the lead roles in comedies, puppet shows, and acrobatic performances. As the century progressed, Ottoman percussions would enter the European family of instruments, adding Turkishness to the musical composition. Meanwhile, contemporary issues including discussions about absolutism or Napoleon's conquest of Egypt and his eventual fall from power would inspire Mozart and Rossini to praise and mock European monarchs under the disguise of Turkish operatic subjects. At the end, Wolff argues that just as the defeat of the Turks in 1683 once made them comically entertaining, a set of political processes in the early 1820s would render them unoperatic: “the Greek independence, full articulation of the Eastern Question, and the clinical acknowledgement of Turkey as the Sick Man of Europe” (403).

I would like to finish with a brief remark that does not aim to throw doubt on the quality of this spectacular scholarship. In the conclusion of The Singing Turk, Larry Wolff preferred a different mode than Inventing Eastern Europe, where he had ended the book with an analysis of a cluster of fiction and nonfiction written about Eastern Europe until the very end of the Cold War. His conclusion was that the Iron Curtain had fallen in 1989, but several years later its shadow still persisted and divided the western and eastern parts of Europe. In The Singing Turk, Wolff's conclusion is a summary of the chapters and a recap of his argument that the Turkish image had disappeared from opera because the acuteness of Ottoman political, social, and cultural crises in the early 1800s stripped the charming element from the Turk as an operatic subject. In light of especially the most recent tumultuous years in the relations between Europe and Turkey, I find here noteworthy the lack of even a brief hint at whether the difference between Europe and Turkey is still cosmetic. Wolff is an intellectual historian of Europe and the majority of his readers will likely not expect that from him. As a researcher interested in the encounters between the Turks and Europeans in early modern and modern era, I appreciate Wolff's effort to avoid orientalist pitfalls. Yet at the end of the book, I wished that he had returned to that uneasy question of Turkey's membership in the European family today and told us whether an intellectual historian of his caliber sees a bigger divide between the western and eastern parts of Europe or between twenty-first-century Turkey and Europe. Curious readers, however, may find the answer, albeit in the form of an incidental remark, in the closing paragraph of a recent article Wolff penned for the New York Review of Book (vol. 64, no. 15, 12 October 2017) about his trip to Pesaro (Italy) for Rossini Opera Festival.