Forty years ago R. J. W. Evans, in his now classic study of The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, observed that, in the absence of a coherent early modern central government, the Habsburg enterprise rested crucially upon the baroque court and Habsburg patronage of the arts. Evans especially noted that “two great synthetic achievements, alike commissioned by court, magnates, and Church, alike immortally associated with the age of baroque in the Habsburg lands: the dramatic extravagance of opera; and its physical counterpart, the monumental architecture of the years around 1700.”Footnote ¹ Evans argued further that baroque art, including opera, contributed to the ideological legitimacy of the court, and therefore the state. This became particularly important during the reign of Emperor Leopold I, who was himself a composer of some distinction and who sponsored one of the supremely monumental operatic productions of the seventeenth century, Antonio Cesti's Il pomo d'oro, on Paris and the prize of the golden apple, staged with twenty-four sets over the course of two days, in honor of the birthday of Leopold's teenage empress, the Spanish Infanta Margarita, in 1668. As a child, she had appeared as the artistic focus of the Spanish court in the painting Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez.

The historic turning point in Habsburg history during Leopold's reign was certainly the Ottoman Siege of Vienna of 1683. While Leopold left the city and established his court more safely at Passau, his commander-in-chief Charles of Lorraine joined his forces with those of the Polish King Jan Sobieski to defeat the Ottomans in battle and lift the siege—which had, for a while, seemed likely to succeed and make Vienna into an Ottoman city. Following the raising of the siege, the Habsburg Christian armies conquered Buda from the Ottomans and drove the Turks from Hungary, which was confirmed as a Habsburg land by the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699. While the two-month Ottoman Siege of Vienna during the summer of 1683 was something exceptionally fearsome for the inhabitants of the city, the Ottoman-Habsburg border had been previously located less than 150 miles from the Habsburg capital, and the proximity of the Ottomans had been menacing to the Viennese for a century and a half. The city was twice besieged by the Turks, for the first time in 1529, in the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, and then again in 1683.

When the Ottomans were driven from Hungary in the late 1680s, however, the Habsburg capital became notably more secure, and Christian Europe more generally experienced collective relief at the discovery that the Ottomans were not invincible, that they did not necessarily always advance but could be driven into recession. It was precisely at the end of the 1680s that the phenomenon of opera about Turks was born in Europe, with the Turks suddenly vulnerable enough to be staged as sympathetic musical protagonists on European operatic stages. Over the course of the next century, from the Siege of Vienna in 1683 to the premiere of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) in Vienna in 1782, it was, in part, the military stature of the Ottoman Empire—no longer martially indomitable, but not yet internationally negligible, not yet the “Sick Man of Europe”—that allowed singing Turks to thrive as sympathetic and entertaining figures in European operas.Footnote ²

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The first such opera appeared before the end of the decade of the 1680s, only six years after the lifting of the Ottoman Siege of Vienna: Il gran Tamerlano (The Great Tamerlane) composed by Venetian composer Marc'Antonio Ziani for Venice in 1689. (Ziani was later Hofkapellmeister—court music director—for the Habsburg court in Vienna.) Venice did participate in the War of the Holy League in alliance with the Habsburgs in the 1680s, and the Venetians were similarly encouraged by signs of Ottoman vulnerability. The subject of Il gran Tamerlano was the encounter between the Central Asian conqueror Tamerlane (Timur) and the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid, which did occur historically in the early fifteenth century when Tamerlane defeated the Turks at the Battle of Ankara in 1402 and took the Ottoman sultan captive. According to legend, Tamerlane kept Bayezid in a cage, and the operatic treatment took as its emotional substance the trauma of Bayezid's captivity: a proud and powerful imperial dynast defeated, captured, and humiliated by an even fiercer military force.

The operatic subject of Tamerlane and Bayezid—which would recur in dozens of operas across the eighteenth century—recapitulated the military defeat of the Ottomans in the 1680s by recreating on stage the moment of Ottoman defeat in 1402. Remarkably, however, Bayezid appeared in the opera—and in every treatment of this subject—as the sympathetic and civilized hero of the work, singing proudly, and sometimes plaintively, in captivity. The figure of the Ottoman sultan, consigned to operatic confinement, could now be received as a sympathetic figure by European audiences, following the decade of the 1680s. The Turk was no longer too terrifying to offer entertainment, engagement, and even identification. One year after Il gran Tamerlano in Venice, Bajazeth und Tamerlan—designated as a Singspiel—was performed in Hamburg with music by Johann Philipp Förtsch.

The most influential operatic exemplar on this subject emerged in Venice in 1711, when the Venetian librettist Agostino Piovene created a text that would be constantly reused or revised throughout the century, receiving its first musical setting by Francesco Gasparini. In Piovene's treatment the sultan Bayezid—written as Bajazet in the libretto—declared that he would gladly welcome death rather than live in captivity, singing an aria in the spirit of classical stoicism: “Forte e lieto a morte andrei” (Strong and glad I would go to my death). Gasparini conceived of the Ottoman sultan as a heroic tenor (set in contrast to the castrato who sang the role of Tamerlane), and it was the tenor Francesco Borosini who worked closely with Gasparini to revise the work for Reggio Emilia in 1719, retitled as Il Bajazet, to emphasize that the sultan was the true hero of the opera. The revised score now included an extended death scene on stage, making this one of the most dramatic roles for tenor voice in opera up until that time. Borosini would then travel to London to star in George Frideric Handel's definitive setting of the subject, Tamerlano of 1724 (using Nicola Francesco Haym's revision of the Piovene libretto), and the basic structure of this libretto would then circulate all over Europe in multiple settings, not apparently reaching Vienna, but touching base in Habsburg Ljubljana in 1732 (music by Giuseppe Clemente Bonomi), Habsburg Milan in 1771 (music by the Habsburg Bohemian Josef Mysliveček, born in Prague), and Habsburg Venice in 1799 (music by Gaetano Marinelli).

The end-of-century return to Venice—which had become a Habsburg city by the Treaty of Campo Formio in 1797—serves as a reminder that operas about Turks emerged in the capital cities of the Triplex Confinium, the geopolitical triple border constituted by the three neighboring states of the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg monarchy, and the Venetian Republic. The Triplex Confinium was not just a militarized border of conflict but also a border of commerce, migration, contact, and familiarity, and the two Christian political capitals of the Triplex Confinium, Venice and Vienna, were also opera capitals in eighteenth-century Europe and, therefore, the musical sites where Ottoman subjects became exceptionally important.Footnote ³

The connection to international affairs was clear enough when Gasparini's 1719 revision for Reggio Emilia followed immediately the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718; it was then that Venice and Vienna concluded a new peace with the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburgs gaining Belgrade (temporarily), but the Ottomans regaining from Venice the Greek Peloponnesus. Borosini's tenorial interpretation of Bajazet's death scene in 1719 became a sort of operatic celebration of the peace of 1718. Though Borosini's performance of Bajazet for Handel in London 1724 was even more musically important, it should be noted that the operatic subject was originally conceived in the context of Venice and the Triplex Confinium—and that Handel came to London soon after spending four formative years in Italy.

When Handel's Tamerlano was revived in 1731, the duke of Lorraine was visiting London, and he is supposed to have sung a part in the opera during a rehearsal.Footnote ⁴ This was Francis Stephen, the son of Charles of Lorraine who had fought against the Turks outside Vienna in 1683 and the future husband of Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa. Of the three principal male roles in the opera, Tamerlane and the Byzantine Prince Andronico were both written for castrati, and Francis Stephen, the future father of Maria Theresa's eleven children, could not possibly have been a castrato. Therefore, it seems most likely that he sang the role of the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid in rehearsal. This surprising role assumption may serve as a reminder that, in the generation following the Ottoman Siege of Vienna, Europeans closely identified with the figure of Ottoman Sultan Bayezid, singing sympathetically his distress in captivity, and that even the future Holy Roman Emperor was possibly interested in identifying with that Ottoman persona and exploring its emotional and political contours. He married Maria Theresa in 1736 and was elected as Holy Roman Emperor in 1745, but his sampling of the role of the Ottoman sultan in London in 1731 could have served as a musical and emotional rehearsal for some of his later political roles. Inevitably, the Triplex Confinium constituted a triple border of intimacy, and imperial rulers in Vienna would have had reason to find some sense of identification with a sultan in Constantinople.

Maria Theresa herself was painted in Turkish costume by Martin van Meytens in the 1740s. Such portraiture serves as a reminder that operas about Turks were being composed in the context of a more general cultural interest in Turkishness, sometimes characterized in its French form as Turquerie. The Swiss painter Jean-Étienne Liotard was in Constantinople from 1738 to 1742 and then came to Vienna in the 1740s; he not only painted portraits of Europeans in Turkish dress but wore Turkish dress himself in his daily life. In France Carle Van Loo painted Turkish scenes, including the musical subject of The Grand Turk Giving a Concert to his Mistress in the 1730s, and then in the 1740s he painted Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV, costumed as a Turkish sultana.Footnote ⁵ Portraiture of Europeans in Ottoman costume—the fashion for Turquerie—thus coincided with the donning of Ottoman costume by opera singers in performance.

At the same time the Enlightenment transformed the European perspective on Islam, with new knowledge about the Muslim religion—which now appeared as one among several world religions, analogous rather than opposed to Christianity. Antoine Galland's landmark French translation of The Thousand and One Nights was published between 1704 and 1717; George Sale's scholarly English translation of the Koran appeared in 1734.Footnote ⁶ Voltaire's Mahomet of 1741, his drama on the life of Mohammed, was fiercely negative in representing the supposed hypocrisy of the prophet, but the enlightened public easily recognized that he was creating a critical analogy between Mohammed and Jesus. (The drama would become an opera in the early nineteenth century, composed by Peter von Winter, and performed at La Scala in Habsburg Milan in 1817.) Voltaire's universal history, Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations (Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations), first published in Geneva in 1756, offered an appreciative perspective on the Ottoman Empire, without any crusading animus, while in 1754 Maria Theresa established in Vienna the Oriental Academy, which institutionalized instruction in the Ottoman language in the interest of Habsburg-Ottoman diplomatic relations. Public interest in operas about Turks was conditioned both by the intellectual developments of the European Enlightenment and the cultural fashions of eighteenth-century Turquerie.

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During the eighteenth century, Janissary percussion would become a hallmark of operas on Turkish themes in Vienna and across the German lands; cymbals, bells, the triangle, and the bass drum were used to replicate some of the sound of Turkish mehter music, as performed by the Ottoman military bands that accompanied the Janissary troops. This Janissary percussion had a special resonance for Vienna, since it was heard outside the walls of the city during the two-month siege of 1683, as the musicians sought to encourage the Ottoman soldiers and create a clamorous onslaught on the ears of the besieged Viennese. One of the proverbial unintended consequences of the Turkish siege was the coming of coffee to Vienna, when Georg Franz Koschitzky opened a coffeehouse with beans that were supposedly left behind in the Turkish camp following the Ottoman defeat. Likewise unintended, and perhaps more unexpected, was the musical historical development following the siege of 1683 by which the Janissary bands, formerly used as a musical accessory of war, were now imported into European courts as celebratory appendages of courtly absolutism. Beginning in Dresden in the early eighteenth century, at the court of Augustus the Strong, Janissary bands celebrated the power and strength of the European sovereign, modeled on the mystique of the absolute power of the Ottoman sultan.Footnote ⁷

Operas about Turks furthered this ideological convergence in the musical expression of political forms, and the eighteenth-century notion of enlightened despotism or absolutism was partly shaped by allusions to Ottoman politics. Historian Lucette Valensi, in her study of “the birth of the despot,” has focused on Venetian reports from the Ottoman Empire, while historian Joan-Pau Rubiés has further developed this theme with his research on “Oriental Despotism and European Orientalism.”Footnote ⁸ Beginning in 1735 “the generous Turk” found his place on the European stage with Rameau's operatic scene entitled Le turc généreux, forming part of his opera-ballet in four scenes, Les Indes galantes (The Gallant Indies). If operas about Bayezid in captivity were always opera seria, fraught with a sense of tragedy, the operas about “generous Turks” were generally comedies; they dealt with Turkish masters holding European captives (especially female captives) and finally deciding, in an act of supreme generosity, to emancipate those captives rather than force them into sexual slavery. Thus, absolute power could be shown to follow the line of absolute magnanimity, celebrating European absolutism in Ottoman costume.

Le turc généreux reached Vienna in 1758, not in the form of an opera, but as a ballet, composed by Joseph Starzer with choreography by Franz Hilverding. The culminating scene was preserved in a print by Venetian artist Bernardo Bellotto, the nephew of Canaletto, showing the turbaned generous Turk at center stage in a setting of extreme rococo elaborateness, a worthy descendent of the baroque staging of Il pomo d'oro for Leopold I.Footnote ⁹ The generous Turk in Vienna in 1758 would have mirrored the magnanimity of the reigning empress and emperor, Maria Theresa and Francis Stephen, but the particular occasion for staging this ballet was the visit of the Ottoman envoy Ahmed Resmi Efendi who acted as a herald to announce the advent of a new sultan in Constantinople, Mustafa III. The presumed magnanimity of the new sultan was also being celebrated in the ballet, while the presence of the Ottoman envoy, to witness the appreciation of Turkish generosity, underlined the intimacy that existed across the borders of the Triplex Confinium in the eighteenth century. Maria Theresa never went to war against the Ottoman Empire (she was, of course, principally preoccupied with war against Prussia), and there was a half century of peace between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans between 1739 and 1788, when Joseph II would renew hostilities.

It was right in the middle of this long interval of peace, six years after the ballet Le turc généreux, that Christoph Willibald Gluck introduced Janissary percussion to operatic performance in Vienna, creating a striking orchestral Turkish impression in the overture of La rencontre imprévue, ou Les pèlerins de la Mecque (The Unexpected Encounter, or The Pilgrims of Mecca). It was another opera about captivity, which concluded with an emancipatory sultanic act of magnanimity, consistent with the ideology of enlightened absolutism at the court of Maria Theresa and Francis Stephen. The opera also featured a comical dervish who practiced a completely hypocritical Muslim piety—sung in the basso register—reflecting the growing hostility to Christian monastic orders in the European Enlightenment. In Vienna this perspective would become particularly prevalent after Joseph became emperor in 1765, succeeding his father Francis Stephen, and Gluck's opera would return to the Vienna stage in 1776 and then again in 1780 with a German libretto as Die unvermuthete Zusammenkunft, oder Die Pilgrimme von Mecca. In the meantime Haydn presented his Italian version of the libretto, L'incontro improvviso, at Esterháza in Hungary—some seventy-five miles from Vienna—also making use of Janissary instrumentation. Furthermore, both Gluck and Haydn, along with other contemporary composers, employed an “alla turca” style—with characteristic repetitions, intervals, and emphases—to represent Turkishness within the framework of eighteenth-century classical music.Footnote ¹⁰

The Haydn production at Esterháza in 1775 and the Gluck German revival in Vienna in 1776 probably also reflected the current international interest in the Ottoman Empire following its defeat by Catherine the Great in the Russian-Turkish War of 1768–74. The Habsburgs did not participate in this war, but the Viennese public could follow with interest—in an age of increasing journalistic activity within a nascent public sphere—while comic operas about Turks flourished in the German courts during the wartime years. These included Soliman der Zweyte, oder Die drey Sultanninen (Soliman the Second, or the Three Sultanas) in Vienna in 1770, Der Kaufmann von Smyrna (The Merchant of Smyrna) in Mannheim in 1771, and Der Bassa von Tunis (The Bassa of Tunis) in Berlin in 1774.

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The defeat of the Turks led to the Treaty of Küçük Kajnarca in 1774, which mandated their acceptance of a consolidated Russian presence on the Black Sea and confirmed the principle of a Russian protective role for Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire. This latter stipulation compromised the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire in ways that were also reflected in operas about Turks, with Europeans operating more and more freely on stage in defiance of Ottoman power. The most notable example of this, the most successful contemporary opera of the singing Turk, and, to this day, the most famous work of the entire genre of operatic Turkishness, was Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail, first performed in Vienna in 1782 and perennially performed all over the world since then. The composition of the opera was originally intended to coincide with a visit to Vienna of the Russian Grand Duke Paul, Catherine's son, and it is therefore plausible to think of the work in relation to the operas that accompanied and followed the Russian-Turkish War.

At the same time, Mozart's Abduction also coincided with the approaching hundredth anniversary of the Ottoman Siege of Vienna of 1683, and therefore possessed a particular Habsburg commemorative significance, the comedy recapitulating the Christian triumph over the Turks while also allowing for the possibility of Ottoman magnanimity according to the convention of the generous Turk. In fact, the Viennese commemorated the anniversary of the lifting of the siege every year on 12 September, the date that was also celebrated as the festival of the Holy Name of the Virgin Mary. According to the journalist Johann Pezzl, writing in the 1780s, the day was religiously commemorated in Vienna for a whole century: “I saw in 1783 the last celebration commemorating that perilous day. They were concluded with the hundredth year. In fact, the cowards of Istanbul (die Hasenfüsse zu Stambul) are no longer worthy of the gunpowder exploded in their memory.”Footnote ¹¹ Joseph II was austerely committed to the reduction of excessive religious celebration, and after 1783 the annual ritual commemoration of the siege was accordingly suspended. Pezzl's contempt for the “cowards of Istanbul” was, however, misplaced bravado, as the Habsburg monarchy went to war against the Ottoman Empire in 1788 with very mixed results and no triumphant outcome.

When Mozart settled in Vienna in 1781, an opera about Turks seemed like a promising path to success in the city; he had abruptly left the service of the Archbishop of Salzburg and was determined to make an impression on the emperor in Vienna. In 1780 Mozart had already been contemplating a German-language Singspiel on a Turkish subject for Joseph's National Singspiel company in Vienna—the incomplete Zaide—and when the composer settled in Vienna in 1781 he shifted to a different libretto with a more emphatically comical construction. Following the 1760s and 1770s, when Gluck and Haydn had made Turkish subjects so successful in the Habsburg monarchy, Mozart had no doubt that he could advance himself with such a work. He also clearly relished the Janissary instruments, and the famous overture to the Abduction brings in the triangle, the cymbals, and the bass drum in the ninth measure to spectacular effect. As Mozart wrote to his father, the overture “alternates between forte and piano; each forte produces some Turkish music and keeps modulating in this manner throughout—I venture to say you can not fall asleep while it plays, even if you haven't slept all night.”Footnote ¹² Mozart had already written his “Turkish” violin concerto in the 1770s and would soon compose in the 1780s his rondo “alla turca” for piano, so his interest in musical Turkishness extended to several genres; it has been noted that in 1781 Turkish music—probably with Janissary instruments—was being played in the Prater in Vienna, and Mozart could well have heard it as he began composing the Abduction.Footnote ¹³

Mozart was programmatically committed to making use of elements of Turkish style in the opera: “The libretto is very good. The subject is Turkish … I am going to write the overture, the first-act chorus, and the final chorus with Turkish music.”Footnote ¹⁴ The first-act chorus was for the Turkish court of Pasha Selim: “Singt dem grossen Bassa Lieder” (Sing songs to the great pasha). The Turkish instrumentation for the chorus was probably presented by musicians who stood on the stage in Turkish costume playing the cymbals and triangle. (This is clearly indicated in images of costumed performers from the Koblenz production of 1787.) The Turkish celebration of Pasha Selim on the stage in Vienna in 1782 could only have been intended as tribute to the enlightened absolutism of Joseph II, who was present personally for the premiere of the performance. Pasha Selim on the stage, receiving a musical homage from a chorus of singing Turks, mirrored the figure of the emperor in the audience who received, transitively, the same homage, amplified by the implicit endorsement of the Viennese public in the theater.

According to Mozart's biography by Franz Xaver Niemetschek from 1798, Joseph is supposed to have commented critically that the Abduction had “an extraordinary number of notes” (gewaltig viel Noten).Footnote ¹⁵ Yet, not one of those notes was sung by the character of Pasha Selim, who served as Joseph's alter ego in the opera. His was a speaking role, which lifted him outside the musical realm of the operatic score and perhaps intensified his relation to the non-singing emperor in the audience. The singing Turk in Mozart's Abduction was the comically enraged figure of Osmin, the overseer of the pasha's harem. Mozart paid lavish attention to the strategic composition of this particular role, as indicated in the letter to his father of 26 September 1781, the most detailed account Mozart ever offered on the creation of one of his operatic characters. He began by naming the singer for whom the role was created, the basso Ludwig Fischer—“we had to make use of such a man, especially since he is a favorite with the public here”—and it is interesting to note that Fischer was associated with other Turkish roles, including the comical dervish in Gluck's Pilgrims of Mecca, a role that Fischer performed in Vienna in 1780.Footnote ¹⁶

Mozart encouraged his librettist Johann Gottlieb Stephanie to further develop the figure of Osmin, who was only a minor figure in the original version by Christoph Friedrich Bretzner, which Stephanie was supposed to revise. Mozart was already composing Osmin's first-act aria before Stephanie had even written the text for it: “In fact I had finished most of the music already before he even knew anything about it.”Footnote ¹⁷ That aria “Solche hergelaufene Laffen” (Such Vagabond Dandies) was a Turkish denunciation of the European intruders, a showpiece aria for basso filled with raging resentment. Mozart was, in fact, composing at the moment of an emerging Ottoman resentment of the West, following the Treaty of Küçük Kajnarca, resentment in particular of the prescribed interventionary role of foreign governments on behalf of Ottoman Christians. Mozart described Osmin as “rude and boorish and an arch-enemy (Erzfeind) of all foreigners.”Footnote ¹⁸ What interested Mozart most, however, was the relation between classical music, with its emphasis on harmony and resolution, and the extreme emotions that seemed to defy the prescribed musical forms. Mozart wrote to his father in the letter of 26 September:

The Janissary instrumentation was intended to lighten the spirit of Osmin's rage, to make it comical and therefore more musically palatable. Fischer's basso voice would help to render that rage beautiful, but Mozart, even while trying to make Osmin's rage musically inoffensive to the ear, remained interested in how it would give expression to extreme emotion through the variation of key and tempo.

Within the aria the sudden expression of rage, marked allegro assai in tempo, with the key shift to A-minor, along with the entrance of the Janissary instruments, featured a furious text provided by Stephanie:

It was a text that made comical nonsense out of rage, since it was clearly impossible to hang someone who had already been beheaded, and the incoherence of expression added a sort of further verisimilitude to the representation of rage. Yet Osmin, at the same time, and within the same aria, sought to restrain his emotions as he focused on a single line of text that expressed his human essence as a reasoning being, the emblematic man of the European Enlightenment: “Ich hab’ auch Verstand” (I also have a mind). The repetition of the phrase, as Osmin seeks to contain his rage, finally brings the music on the final syllable to the bottom of the basso register, to the low F, which also corresponds to the harmonic key of the aria and therefore resolves the musical tension while stabilizing his emotional state.

That he cannot maintain that stable sense of self but instead breaks out, allegro assai, singing “Erst geköpft,” is part of Osmin's character as a singing Turk—for Turks were supposed to be susceptible to extreme emotions. The French-Hungarian Baron François de Tott, who helped to improve Ottoman weaponry and fortifications in the 1770s, wrote in the 1780s about what he perceived as the relation between Ottoman political despotism and Turkish extreme emotions. “If the climate that the Turks inhabit relaxes their fibers,” observed Tott, “the despotism to which they are subject brings them to violence; they are sometimes ferocious.”Footnote ²⁰ The Ottoman Osmin was clearly inclined to a violence of emotions, but Mozart also placed him in a clear relation to the European public, no less concerned to moderate the display of emotions, a concern of some importance to Mozart. When Mozart represented operatically a man who could not control the expression of his own emotions, he was probably thinking about himself above all. On 9 May 1781, breaking with the Archbishop of Salzburg, he wrote, “I hate the archbishop to the point of madness [zur Raserey].”Footnote ²¹ On 20 July 1782, when Ludwig Fischer made some musical mistakes in a performance of the Abduction, Mozart wrote, “Unfortunately Fischer was off … so the whole effect of the trio was lost, and this time there was no encore. I was in such a rage that I didn't recognize myself [Ich war so in Wuth dass ich mich nichte kannte].” This phrasing almost precisely echoed his account of Osmin's rage in the letter to Leopold of 26 September 1781: “A person who gets into such a violent rage oversteps all order, measure, and object; he no longer knows himself.”Footnote ²² Thus, the problem of emotional control, vocalized by the singing Turk Osmin, was in fact a personal problem for Mozart and, more generally, a European issue during the eighteenth century.

Norbert Elias, in his account of the history of manners, suggested that the restraint of anger through manners and courtesy was a part of the civilizing process for European bourgeois society in the eighteenth century.Footnote ²³ Osmin's repeated reminder to himself, “Ich hab’ auch Verstand,” should be understood in relation to that civilizing process. A set of rules of civility from the eighteenth century, copied out by George Washington, includes, for instance, the prescription: “Be not Angry at Table whatever happens & if you have reason to be so, Shew it not, put on a Chearfull Countenance especially if there be Strangers for good Humour makes one Dish of Meat a Feast.”Footnote ²⁴ Osmin does, in fact, have reason to be angry, as the foreigners are indeed attempting to make a fool of him, to abduct the captive women from the harem that he oversees. A man of manners, however, would not show that anger, whether justified or not. Late eighteenth-century Vienna was, furthermore, a site for the exploration of extreme emotions, as was evident in the pioneering sculptural work of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt whose character busts, created in the 1770s and early 1780s, first in Vienna and then in Bratislava, offered a sort of artistic encyclopedia of extreme emotions, sculpted without concern that they might appear aesthetically unpleasing.

Osmin's status as the pasha's overseer offers another clue to the motives for his rage because the overseer of the harem, anywhere in the Ottoman Empire, would have been likely to be a eunuch. The subject of eunuchs and their emotional temperament was foundational for the Enlightenment, inasmuch as Montesquieu made them central to the Persian Letters of 1721, featuring the bitterly resentful and cruelly repressive eunuchs of Usbek's harem in Isfahan. From his role in the libretto of the Abduction, Osmin would have to be assumed to be a eunuch, but Mozart—who was very well acquainted with castrated men because, as castrati, they were among the great musicians of the eighteenth century—went out of his way to make clear that Osmin was not a eunuch, casting him as a basso, and letting him sing his way all the down to low F, the undeniable demonstration of testosterone. This audible masculinity of Osmin, the singing Turk, further suggests that for Mozart the control of extreme emotions was not a specialized problem of the Ottoman Empire or its harems, but was, more generally, a human problem.

Osmin's struggle with his own emotions was foreshadowed by his anticipatory counterpart, the earlier Osmin that Mozart created for the unfinished opera Zaide in 1780. The earlier Osmin was another basso role for the figure of a Turk in service, serving the Sultan Soliman, but this Osmin took a self-consciously comical perspective on his own emotions and sang a laughing aria—also marked allegro assai—with the rather fiercely reiterated monotone syllable “ha ha ha!” Like Papageno in Mozart's Magic Flute, the Osmin of Zaide likes to eat and drink and believes that anyone who is too distressed to enjoy his dinner is a complete fool: “Wer soll nicht drüber lachen, ha ha ha!” (Who would not laugh at him, ha ha ha!) The aria specifically derides those who give in to their emotions:

Thus the earlier Osmin both anticipates and passes judgment on the later Osmin, laughing at his operatic successor for succumbing to his own extreme emotions. This consistency of musical interest in emotional control shows how closely Mozart associated this problem with the dynamics of operas on Turkish subjects even as he recognized its relevance to his own life and career.

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Mozart's Abduction was intended “to make his own fortune” in Vienna by creating an impression on the Viennese public and especially on the Viennese emperor. Pasha Selim on stage, reflecting the power of Joseph II in the audience, was saluted in the third-act chorus—“Bassa Selim, lebe lange!” (live long!)—with Janissary instruments to emphasize the power and charisma of the pasha and emperor. At the finale, each of the Europeans, emancipated by the generous Turk, sings a verse saluting the pasha's magnanimity. They join in the chorus: “Wer so viel Huld vergessen kann, den seh’ man mit Verachtung an” (Whoever can forget such benevolence, regard him with contempt). The parallel between the Christian enlightened emperor and the Muslim enlightened pasha was all the more relevant at the moment of Joseph's Patent of Toleration, which was issued in 1781, just as Mozart began composing the Abduction. In 1782, the year of the opera's premiere, a pamphlet entitled Solomon and Joseph II compared the Christian emperor to the biblical Hebrew king, in tribute to the relative toleration that was now extended to Habsburg Jews.Footnote ²⁵ While Joseph's reforms of the early 1780s allowed degrees of toleration to Protestants, Greek Orthodox, and Jews, the drama Nathan the Wise, by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, published in 1779 and performed in 1783 in Berlin, compared Christianity, Judaism, and Islam as possessing parallel religious truths. Thus, the Josephine reforms, in the context of the broader intellectual currents of the German Enlightenment, framed the presentation and reception of Mozart's Turkish operatic scenario in 1782. Ernst Wangermann has suggested that Mozart's Magic Flute of 1791, with its Egyptian Masonic symbolism, was “the culmination of the Austrian achievement in the age of Enlightenment”—but the Abduction of 1781, with its Turkish presentation of enlightened absolutism, was also expressive of the ideals of enlightened Habsburg Josephinism.Footnote ²⁶

The Abduction continued to be performed widely in the 1780s, and the pasha's benevolence was thus repeatedly re-inscribed in public memory, but Joseph's own enlightened reforms failed to sustain his popularity. In 1787, a year when the Abduction was staged in Hanover, Hamburg, Breslau, and Koblenz (to follow in 1788 in Graz, Berlin, Budapest, Brunswick, Hildesheim, and Königsberg) a pamphlet entitled Warum wird Kaiser Joseph von seinem Volke nicht geliebt? (Why is Emperor Joseph not loved by his people?) was published in Vienna. Because Joseph had dramatically reduced state censorship, his own popularity was subject to the volatility of the public sphere, and criticisms of his enlightened reforms were articulated from a variety of political perspectives. It was indeed possible for the public to forget the benevolence of absolutism: to find absolutism to be insufficiently benevolent, or benevolence to be excessively absolutist. According to Wangermann, “More significant than any criticism directed against particular policies was the opposition to absolutism itself, which became clear and explicit towards the end of Joseph's reign.”Footnote ²⁷ This was the same absolutism that Mozart had celebrated in Turkish costume in the Abduction at the beginning of the 1780s. Mozart too seemed to be losing some of his public favor in Vienna in 1787, following the presentation of The Marriage of Figaro in 1786. Both the emperor and the composer would continue to see their fortune and favor fluctuate with the beginning of the Habsburg-Ottoman War in 1788.

Joseph, while facing increasing national resistance to his rule in Hungary and the Netherlands and waning popularity in Vienna, felt obligated by his alliance with Russia to enter the Ottoman War. He also looked for territorial gains to compensate for his mother's loss of Silesia to Prussia in the previous generation. The Ottomans, however, invaded the Habsburg Banat, and though the Habsburg army did besiege and capture Ottoman Belgrade in 1789, it was returned to the Turks by the Treaty of Sistova in 1791. During the war Joseph personally led his troops in the field, and these campaigns are supposed to have led to his illness and death in 1790. The Habsburg-Ottoman War may also have been partly responsible for the downturn in Mozart's professional career, as musical opportunities decreased in wartime, leaving the composer in increasing debt.Footnote ²⁸

Mozart participated momentarily in the excitement of the Ottoman War and, in an unusual song of war, or “Kriegslied,” imagined himself as the emperor going into battle, at a galloping tempo with a strong dotted rhythm: “Ich möchte wohl der Kaiser sein” (I wish I were the emperor). Mozart's identification with Joseph, at this moment of military engagement, was specifically Turkish in its implications—with the Janissary instruments in the orchestral accompaniment—while the refrain, as articulated in the hypothetical subjunctive mood, posed the possibility of tantalizing conquest: “Konstantinopel wäre mein!” (Constantinople would be mine!). Derek Beales notes that “some Austrian historians and musicologists have tried to explain away what they see as the unbelievable and discreditable facts that Mozart set the jingoistic sentiments of the poem by [Johann] Gleim and that the Viennese public apparently enjoyed them.” Beales, rather, sees Mozart as reflecting one facet of the shifting moods of a Viennese public that oscillated between enthusiasm and discontent in wartime.Footnote ²⁹ In fact, one might further note that Mozart's excitement about Constantinople, even as an object of conquest, was consistent with his ongoing interest in Turkish scenarios.

The Abduction did not present a “conquest” of the Ottoman Empire in large part because the happy ending arose from the pasha's magnanimity. He never lost control of his own imperial domain. This continued to be true for later comic operas about generous Turks, works by Mozart's contemporaries in the German Singspiel tradition, like Soliman II composed for Stockholm in 1789 by Joseph Martin Kraus and Soliman der Zweyte by Franz Xaver Süssmayr for Vienna in 1799. The last important composer in the tradition of the singing Turk was Gioachino Rossini who, at the age of twenty-one, had a sensational success in Venice in 1813 with L'italiana in Algeri (The Italian Girl in Algiers), with the heroine here leading a more frankly imperialist routing of her Muslim nemesis Mustafa Bey, in some sense anticipating the actual French conquest of Algeria in 1830. Yet, Rossini reversed the terms of conquest the very next year in 1814, when he presented at La Scala in Milan Il turco in Italia, an opera about a Turk who came and conquered in Italy—but not by military conquest, rather by romantic conquest. The Italian heroine found him irresistible.

These Rossini operas, performed in Venice in 1813 and Milan in 1814, were staged at the precipitous moment when Napoleonic Italy was about to be undone, at the moment when Venice and Milan were about to become Habsburg cities. “Traveling through the province of Venice in the year 1817,” wrote Stendhal, “I found L'italiana being performed simultaneously in Brescia, in Verona, in Venice itself, in Vicenza, and in Treviso.”Footnote ³⁰ Venice was just another Habsburg province in 1817, and the Italian operatic triumph in Ottoman Algeria, conceived at the moment of Napoleonic collapse, now accompanied the new condition of Italian subjection within the Habsburg Empire. In 1817, L'italiana was also performed in Bourbon Paris at the Théâtre-Italien and in Habsburg Vienna at the Kärntnertor Court Theater, fully adaptable to the capitals of the post-Napoleonic Restoration. In 1822 Rossini made a triumphant visit to Vienna as the most celebrated composer of the age, with Metternich holding a dinner in his honor. Rossini visited Beethoven and found him to be sadly neglected (by comparison with himself). In the 1820s Beethoven's Ninth Symphony would discreetly include, in the final movement, a Turkish march, with Janissary instruments, a gesture of appreciation for the Turkish musical preoccupations of the previous century. It was Rossini, however, who would brilliantly bring the tradition of operatic Turkishness to a close.

The last important opera in the long history of the singing Turk would be Rossini's Maometto Secondo of 1820 in Naples, presented in Habsburg Venice in 1822, and then in Paris in 1826 as Le Siège de Corinthe. The charismatic protagonist was Mehmed II, or Mehmed Fatih, the conqueror of Constantinople in 1453, the operatic incarnation of Mozart's fantasy in song: “Konstantinopel wäre mein!” By the 1820s, the figure of the conquering sultan would have seemed to allude to the recent career of Napoleon Bonaparte, who died on St. Helena in 1821 but whose historical phantom continued to haunt the lands of Habsburg Italy. As in Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio—which juxtaposed a generous Turk with an enlightened Habsburg emperor—the tradition of the singing Turk in European opera allowed for a series of complex identifications and associations. In the Habsburg monarchy, with its long history of engagement with the Ottoman Empire, the singing Turk was never just an exotic alien, but a figure in whom European publics were able to recognize themselves and their own contemporary concerns.