ABSTRACT
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Turkish music exemplifies Edward W. Said’s description of Orientalism’s domestication of alterity. Mozart maps difference onto gestures that were already known, defamiliarising and reforming familiar topics of late eighteenth-century European music. Mozart’s Turkish music is formed from several Western European topics, including march, battaglia and contredanse. The notion of European art music’s expansion upon what is implied to be a rather restricted original points to the critically self-conscious importance of the resources of Western art music in Viennese Turkish music. Mozart’s first surviving essay in Turkish musical exoticism, an entr’acte ballet for his opera seria Lucio Silla titled ‘Le gelosie del serraglio’ illustrates how his Turkish music was embedded in an existing Viennese network of representations. Mozart’s letter concerning the representation of Osmin’s rage exemplifies the eighteenth-century composer’s commitment to pleasure and beauty even in, or particularly in entering the theatre of terror.
