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 22, 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.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
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.