ABSTRACT
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Turkish music can be linked to the wider social practice of masquerade not only through a metaphor of disguise applied at the level of musical style and topic, but by common forms of play with identity. The remote ancestry of Mozart’s Turkish music lies in the carnivalesque, as influentially theorised by M. M. Bakhtin in a reading of Rabelais. In Bakhtin’s reading, the carnivalesque finds its locus classicus in the ‘folk humour’ and ‘carnival festivities’ of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The theatrical representation and experience of Otherness was not confined to the stage: it was a principle to live by. In the context of Freemasonry, masquerade and Orientalism extended to semi-permanent self-Othering, an imaginary communion of the Viennese present with the Egyptian past that was sufficiently threatening to be banned in 1790 by Joseph II.
