On his book The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon
Cover Interview of March 21, 2017
Lastly
I’m eager to have readers think more deeply about the long
history of how Europe has contemplated Turkey, and how the West has regarded
the Islamic world. I want to encourage readers to consider how opera intersects
with history and to think about musical issues as an important part of European
cultural history — crossing the disciplinary lines that sometimes separate us
as historians from our colleagues in the music department. I’d like to invite
readers into a lost and largely forgotten world of musical and dramatic
entertainments, and try to give a sense of their cultural and political
meanings for people who would have been going to the opera in the eighteenth
century. To give a sense of the music, I’ve also created a website that would
allow readers to listen to relevant excerpts from the music of Singing Turk
operas while they are reading my book. I
hope that readers will find that a useful resource.
One great thing that we were able to do at NYU was to stage
an academic symposium about the book, combined with the live performance of
musical selections from the operas, and it’s also possible to have a look at
the video and audio of that symposium.
Finally, I’m excited to see that some of these operas are
being performed today. Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio is, of
course, regularly performed, and I wrote about it in The New York Times when it was performed at the Metropolitan Opera in the spring of 2016. But I was also excited to see Il Turco in Italia (The Turk in Italy)
performed in a brilliant production at the Rossini Pesaro festival in summer
2016, and Pesaro will produce two more Rossini operas from this tradition in
summer 2017, La pietra del paragone and Le siège de Corinthe. I’d
love it if my book contributed to a renewal of current interest in these
fascinating works, which have a lot to offer for thinking about the Western
relation to the Islamic world, including cultural encounters and mutual
misunderstandings, back when these operas were composed and still today.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
Lastly
I’m eager to have readers think more deeply about the long history of how Europe has contemplated Turkey, and how the West has regarded the Islamic world. I want to encourage readers to consider how opera intersects with history and to think about musical issues as an important part of European cultural history — crossing the disciplinary lines that sometimes separate us as historians from our colleagues in the music department. I’d like to invite readers into a lost and largely forgotten world of musical and dramatic entertainments, and try to give a sense of their cultural and political meanings for people who would have been going to the opera in the eighteenth century. To give a sense of the music, I’ve also created a website that would allow readers to listen to relevant excerpts from the music of Singing Turk operas while they are reading my book. I hope that readers will find that a useful resource.
One great thing that we were able to do at NYU was to stage an academic symposium about the book, combined with the live performance of musical selections from the operas, and it’s also possible to have a look at the video and audio of that symposium.
Finally, I’m excited to see that some of these operas are being performed today. Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio is, of course, regularly performed, and I wrote about it in The New York Times when it was performed at the Metropolitan Opera in the spring of 2016. But I was also excited to see Il Turco in Italia (The Turk in Italy) performed in a brilliant production at the Rossini Pesaro festival in summer 2016, and Pesaro will produce two more Rossini operas from this tradition in summer 2017, La pietra del paragone and Le siège de Corinthe. I’d love it if my book contributed to a renewal of current interest in these fascinating works, which have a lot to offer for thinking about the Western relation to the Islamic world, including cultural encounters and mutual misunderstandings, back when these operas were composed and still today.