The Turk on the Opera Stage

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2009 in the subject Musicology - Miscellaneous grade: 2.0 University of Osnabrück (Musikwissenschaft) language: English abstract: This thesis is about the presentation of the Turks in operas of the West-ern European nations. I will have a look at which different roles where used to describe the Turks. In the sense of this paper the term Turk does not restrict its perspective to the area of the modern Republic of Turkey. As for example Preibisch (1908 p13) notes: during the 18th century composers did not distinguish between for example Persia and Turkey. Pahlen (1980 p12) even suggests that the whole Arabian community was regarded as Turkish. Moreover except other Arabian countries sometimes even China and India were regarded as Turkey (Whaples 1998 p4). To be precise this inaccuracy can be applied to a lot of other countries that were part of the Ottoman Empire like Egypt Algeria and so on. However although some of the operas that will be discussed in this paper do not play in Turkey or contain Turkish charac-ters but are placed in neighboring countries of the Ottoman Empire or contain characters from these countries these works will also be dis-cussed because from the perspective of our ancestors they all display Turkish elements. The definition of Turkish that will be used in this pa-per is therefore similar to that used by Griffel (1975 p85ff) and is based on a rather dynamic concept. This means when analyzing an opera concerning its Turkishness the common perspective of the time has to be kept in mind. Apart from that I will analyze how the typical characters changed over the course of time keeping in mind the historical background. This is achieved by comparing similar characters from different operas with each other. As we will see basically the timeline can be separated in three different parts. In the baroque-period the Turks were generally viewable in heroic roles which fitted to the concept of the