Larry Wolff's study of Turkish figures in European opera brings a cultural historian's sensibility to a topic that has been much explored by musicologists in recent years. The Singing Turk is a thoughtful meditation on the interplay between operatic content and international political relations, and it weighs decisively in favour of opera's dependence on political change. While most musicological studies of ‘Turkish’ content in opera emphasize stylistic or discursive exoticism, Wolff links broad thematic shifts in the repertory to the changing fortunes of the Ottoman, Hapsburg and Venetian states, the rise and fall of the Napoleonic Empire and even the French occupation of Algiers. Indeed, the book's most striking contribution is its argument that the waning of the Ottoman Empire in the early nineteenth century was causally linked to the disappearance of the ‘singing Turk’ from Europe's stages by the 1830s. This finding alone makes the book required reading for interested musicologists, opera specialists and cultural historians, and it should provoke debate for years to come.

While the book's macro-historical points are important, detailed consideration of Turkish themes and figures in the repertory is integral to its argument, as one would expect. Wolff's repertorial survey is impressive, emphasizing the period from the late seventeenth century to the 1820s, but extending in the last chapters to the First World War (when the Ottoman Empire finally collapsed). Given the book's topic, the discussion of the operas naturally stresses their texts and visual stage elements, but their music receives consideration too. This is not a musicological study, as the author states outright (5), and this is borne out by the book's rather schematic, descriptive tendency on matters of sound or style. Taken on its own terms, though, the book's survey of both canonic and lesser-known operas across a long time span is more than adequate to its task, and scrutinizing its music writing overmuch would be missing the point.

Its chapters range widely across the continent's major opera capitals, genres and registers, and conventional style periods, following the fortunes of Turkish thematics on stage as they coincided with major events in Eurasian political history. I found this organization refreshing and productively disorienting, as a departure from the more usual categories and chronologies of opera history. We have chapters on repertorial change after the Siege of Vienna (chapter 1) and at its centennial (chapter 5), chapters focused on Western European political developments, such as Hapsburg reformism under Joseph II (chapter 6) and the French Restoration (chapter 11), and a chapter on Napoleonic imperialism (chapter 7). Interspersed with these historically oriented chapters are others focusing on operatic tropes, like the ‘generous Turk’ (chapter 2), the ‘triumphant Sultana’ (chapter 3) and the typecast character of Maometto (chapter 10). Major eighteenth-century opera composers find their place as well. Gluck and Haydn are highlighted in chapter 4, and Mozart's Entführung aus dem Serail recurs in chapters 5 and 6. Perhaps the most surprising appearance is Rossini, whose Turkish-themed operas are a focus of the last third of the book (chapters 7–11).

Wolff's wide-ranging discussion in these chapters encompasses several topical threads. These include the changing stage representation of Turks and Ottomans, of course, but also librettists’ and composers’ emotional characterization of Turkish figures. The latter topic will be familiar to scholars of eighteenth-century music from studies of the passions in opera before 1800 and from work on operatic exoticism. By extending the discussion of emotional characterization across the long eighteenth century – including into Rossinian opera – Wolff affords a sense of how emotional representation on stage conveyed changing Western and Central European attitudes toward the Ottoman Empire. Following Edward Said, whom he cites as an influence (7), he concludes that the emotional comportment of operatic Turks was, first and foremost, a fantasy affirming European norms.

Another very interesting thread is the discussion of Turkish material in comic versus tragic musical theatre, particularly in France. Wolff makes much of the French tendency to treat Turkish themes as romance or comedy and attributes this preference to France's history of forming tacit alliances with the Ottomans. He points to the Parisian fair theatres’ love of ‘musical comedies of Ottoman captivity’ (79) in the early eighteenth century and the reinvention of this trope in the city's legitimate theatres, beginning with Rameau's Le Turc généreux (1735). There and elsewhere, Wolff notes,

The choice of comedy and romance – in the sense of fabulous adventure, as well as erotic intrigue – accommodated France's relatively friendly stance toward the Ottomans. ‘In Paris’, Wolff concludes, ‘the Ottomans never appeared as fearful as they did from Vienna or Venice, not just because of the greater remoteness but also because France had been historically the implicit ally of the sultans against the common Hapsburg enemy’ (392).

This puts me in mind of Fredric Jameson's Cold-War-era argument about romance as a literary mode that centres on the recognition of a former enemy as no longer evil, but in some ways like the self: the moment, in his words, that ‘the antagonist ceases to be a villain’ (Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981; London: Routledge Classics, 2002), 104–105). Literary historians have revised Jameson in the decades since The Political Unconscious first appeared, but his sense of romance's ideological charge seems to support Wolff's argument about France's ‘singing Turks’. It's very likely that the content of Turkish operas would have ‘mediated’ Ottoman–French relations in some way (to borrow the Marxian term), and it would be interesting to see someone take up this question in a dedicated study. In the context of Wolff's broader investigation, though, I wonder whether it is wise to put so much pressure on the difference of Parisian Turkish opera vis-à-vis other opera capitals. Musical comedy and romance were generally ascendant in Paris across the eighteenth century, at the expense of serious genres like the tragédie en musique. French librettists also treated many other foreign topics comically or in a romance mode. How do we know that Ottoman storylines weren't comic in Paris because lighter forms of musical theatre were what patrons and audiences preferred there after 1700? Opera poetics and aesthetics also had their own logics, especially in Paris's highly self-conscious theatre culture, and even comic opera didn't necessarily directly reflect current events.

I would have welcomed more reflection on structural problems like these, which follow on Wolff's claim that European opera's Turkish content was not just politicized, but tied to the contingencies of Ottoman–Western European relations. The most convincing layer of this argument, to my mind, was also the largest in scale: his contention that the disappearance of ‘singing Turks’ in new operas responded to the demise of open warfare between the Ottomans and their European neighbours. It may be that the longue durée argument works best because the political causality Wolff documents operated on that scale, with specific features of opera's Turkish content responding to more local social, political and aesthetic conditions.

In the last analysis, though, these are questions I'm left asking thanks to Wolff's enjoyable and provocative exploration of ways in which Europeans' obsession with the Ottomans played out on stage. One of the strongest messages to take away from the book is the entangled nature of European opera history. Entangled or connected historiographies have received much attention among historians in recent years, and Wolff's study takes us a good way toward such approaches to opera along the Ottoman–Central European frontier. I particularly appreciated small but telling historical details, like the fact that Gaetano Donizetti's brother, Giuseppe, was in charge of the Western-style music education programme at Istanbul's Muzika-I Humayun Mektebi (Imperial Music School, founded 1831) (361). Likewise, while we have long known of the Janissaries’ musical influence on Central European composers, the regular performance of Italian operas in Istanbul in the 1840s (372–373) should also be part of our common lore. Wolff's cultural history suggests a greater degree of entanglement across imperial, religious and regional borders than European opera histories normally allow, and that is wholly to be welcomed.