ABSTRACT
According to Carl Dahlhaus, the Orient offered nineteenth-century opera librettists "an untapped reservoir of material that virtually cried out for exploitation, especially in view of the endless stream of Oriental literature in France following Napoleon's Egyptian campaign." Opera can transform the musical stage for the audience, using spectacle and illusion to construct a world of distant fantasy and desire. In eighteenth-century opera, music did not always play the major role in depicting Otherness, but rather took a back seat to elements such as scenery, costume, and stage effects, which were designed to create the illusion that the action was indeed taking place in the Orient. Victor Hugo's preface to his Les Orientales acknowledged his seduction by everything Eastern, a seduction he felt would prove to be too strong for other artists to resist. The association of Oriental music with noise and violence can be observed in the early diaries of European travelers.
