Ottoman Empire and European Theatre Vol. IV

Seraglios in Theatre, Music and Literature

Michael Hüttler, Hans Ernst Weidinger, Michael Hüttler, Hans Ernst Weidinger

• Publisher: Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783990121900
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'art

The book series "Ottomania" researches cultural transfers between the Ottoman Empire and Europe, with the performing arts as its focus.In Ottoman Empire and European Theatre, vol. IV: Seraglios in Theatre, Music and Literature, the series continues to explore one of the most popular subjects of eighteenth-century art: the seraglio and its harem. This volume provides a deeper understanding of the seraglio's various manifestations in the artworks, music and theatre of the Austrian/ Habsburg and central European regions, including interconnections with Italy and France, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.The studies examine descriptions of the seraglio by European diplomats, the seraglio's visual traces in European artworks, and depictions of the seraglio in eighteenth-century Austrian Singspiele. They also consider seraglios from the Ottoman point of view and investigate the music of the seraglio in eighteenth-century opera.

ACT IV

HAREM FANTASIES ON THE LATE EIGHTEENTH- AND EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY AUSTRIAN STAGE

BUT NOT ALL ARE GENTLEMEN: THE DARK SIDE OF THE HAREM FANTASY IN THE WORKS OF PERINET, SPIESS AND HENSLER

JOHN SIENICKI (GRAND RAPIDS/MI)

Western scholars of relations between Austria and Turkey have by now reached a clear consensus on a standard picture of how the general Austrian perception of Turkish people changed from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century. This change is seen as gradual and progressive. In the seventeenth century the predominant note in Austrian writings about the Ottoman Empire and Turkish people is fear. But after the defeat of the invading Turkish army outside Vienna in 1683, as the threat of Ottoman conquest became more and more remote, Austrian fear of ‘the Turk’ steadily diminished and Austrians gradually developed a more realistic view of Turkey and its people. By the nineteenth century Turks were seen much less as something akin to unfriendly aliens from another planet, and much more as fellow human beings who lived in somewhat different ways and practiced a different religion.¹

There are two factors that are commonly cited as underlying, in general, this normalization of relations. One is simply proximity – when the element of desperate fear was removed, the Austrians and the Turks were free to get to know each other as neighbours do. The second factor is the spread of Enlightenment ideas in Europe. The notion that one should understand other people as they actually are gained currency in European intellectual circles in the eighteenth century, and the Ottoman Empire was one of the main areas to which this insight was applied.

I will not argue that this picture is wrong. In fact I believe it is, on the whole, quite correct. I am proposing that one small but significant correction needs to be made. The progression toward toleration, from the Viennese side, was not entirely smooth. There was a brief period during the years of the French Revolution, from 1789 to 1794, when the threat of the ‘evil Turk’ made a spectacular return to the literature and theatre of Germany and Austria, as I will try to show through two very notable examples.

REFINEMENT VS. REALISM AS LITERARY IDEALS

Before turning to these examples, it will be helpful to gain some perspective by looking at one idea of the Enlightenment that coexisted rather uncomfortably with some of the others: the idea of refinement in literature. This ideal of good taste was by no means shared by all and was much contested, yet it is clear that by 1800 the standard of acceptability in literature and theatre, across Europe, was far different than it had been a century earlier. In the German-speaking lands, this contest was centered on the Hanswurst-Streit, the battle over Hanswurst.² The character Hanswurst, represented the point of view of the common people and made a virtue of vulgarity when it was directed against appropriate targets. His popularity began in Vienna and spread across all of Germany in the first half of the eighteenth century – but the reaction against this phenomenon proved to be even stronger. For example, in Vienna, the government of Maria Theresa (b.1717, r.1740–1780) issued a decree in 1752, banning from the stage not only the Hanswurst genre of comedy, but also all forms of theatre that used improvisation. In the 1780s a much cleaned-up version of the original Hanswurst returned to Vienna with great success as the character Kaspar. A similar progression may be observed in England, where the open bawdiness of seventeenth-century Restoration plays gave way first to the eighteenth century’s somewhat more refined popular novels on similar themes, and then to a style, as the nineteenth century began, in which themes considered unacceptable for discussion in polite society were treated only in heavily disguised form, if at all.

In France, however, these issues of realism and all-inclusiveness versus refinement and selectivity in literature became entangled with issues of freedom and repression, issues of democracy versus aristocracy as philosophies of government, and issues of religion and secular life. Works that openly described and discussed sexual acts were categorized as ‘philosophical’ books, and Robert Darnton has done much work to show that this was not merely a subterfuge to sell forbidden books with obscene content.³ While there was one strand of Enlightenment thought that held that it was morally correct to withhold some subjects from public view and discussion, there was another strand that held, with equal conviction and seriousness that every kind of truth ought to be brought out into the open.

Even though the anti-Hanswurst forces seemed to have won an overwhelming victory in Germany, the other side never admitted complete defeat. In his 1773 play Götz von Berlichingen Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) had his protagonist use an obscene phrase, in most Hanswurstian style, as his response to a challenge that he considered unworthy of any other answer. This phrase is known to this day, at least in Vienna, as the ‘klassische Antwort’ (‘classical answer’), and present-day newspapers can indicate that this phrase was used by saying that the speaker was ‘quoting Goethe’. The fast-growing market for popular novels led to the publication of works such as Siegwart (1776) by the Swabian poet and pastor Johann Martin Miller (1750–1814). The second most important German novel of the decade (behind Goethe’s Werther, 1774), Siegwart painted a much more realistic picture of country life than most readers were accustomed to, with (disguised) depictions of male adolescent sexuality and unflattering portraits of (fictional) aristocrats. The celebrated poet Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813), living in Weimar, was allowed to publish Der Teutsche Merkur, a magazine inspired by the Mercure de France, which introduced something of the French critical style of thinking into Germany.

But then came the French Revolution, and there was a substantial amount of sympathy in Germany for the French republican cause. Two novelists writing in German – Carl Gottlob Cramer (1758–1817) and Christian Heinrich Spiess (1755–1799) – took advantage of this opportunity to point the German popular novel toward the future by reintroducing some of the old Baroque realism. One of Cramer’s most influential novels, the four-part Erasmus Schleicher (1789), is a rambling but passionate indictment of the unthinking harm done to the common people by self-indulgent German aristocrats. Modeled on the English novels of Henry Fielding (1707–1754) and Laurence Sterne (1713–1768), Erasmus Schleicher also became a lightning rod for attacks from the defenders of propriety because it included a scene in which a frightened man soils his trousers, and because Cramer wrote about women’s breasts in two erotic scenes (one of which was between two women).⁴ Such incidents would not have been very remarkable, even if acted by actual persons on a stage, several decades before. But in the line of development of German writing after 1750, these passages function as a manifesto, positioning Cramer as an intellectual ally of the French philosophes. Spiess I will discuss, in some detail, later.

PERINET/MÜLLER: KASPAR, DER FAGOTTIST (1791)

As I have already indicated, this movement to reintroduce raw reality also affected cultural production in Vienna, although the results were somewhat less startling than in Germany. This relative restraint can be explained partly by the fact that the Habsburg government was, beginning in the 1780s, the leader among German states in developing an effective system of repression, combining strict censorship with a network of secret police. Austria’s government was also clearly better than most others in Europe at that time when it came to taking care of its people. For both reasons, it was less likely in Austria that a writer would use shock tactics to give voice to the cries of the populace. Yet there were still things that needed to be complained about. The theatre, by tradition and by government policy, was the medium of communication that was allowed the most freedom in Austria, and so the Viennese equivalent of Erasmus Schleicher was not a novel, but a 1791 musical play featuring Vienna’s favourite character. Produced at the Leopoldstadt Theatre and entitled Kaspar, der Fagottist (‘Kaspar, the bassoonist’), it had a text by the relatively unknown young writer Joachim Perinet (1763–1816) and music by the theatre’s Kapellmeister, Wenzel Müller (1759–1835).⁵

This play is known to music scholars because it was based on the same story that also inspired, to some extent, a work now much more famous, Emanuel Schikaneder’s (1751–1812) Die Zauberflöte (‘The magic flute’, 1791), which premiered later in the same year at the rival Freihaus Theatre. In fact, there is a general sense of bewilderment among present-day musicologists about the great success of Kaspar, der Fagottist, which was one of the most-performed Viennese plays of its time, given that posterity has chosen to remember one of these shows, with its music by Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (1756–1791), and forget the other. The answer to this puzzle surely lies in the content of Kaspar, der Fagottist, and in the fact that some of the most exciting moments of this show were specifically appropriate only in the context of the few years from 1789 to 1794, when the presentation of such content was welcomed in Vienna.

The plot was taken from Lulu, oder die Zauberflöte, a recently-written fairy tale imported from Germany. This story was not at all radical in content, but it had progressive credentials because it had been published under Wieland’s name in a collection of fairy tales, although he was not the author of that particular story.⁶ Kaspar, der Fagottist follows the story line of the original much more closely than Die Zauberflöte does, but there are two moments in the show where Perinet and Müller took elements from the story and shaped them into scenes with music, miniature dramas in themselves, which offer strong comment on issues that were then hot topics of concern in Vienna.

Even in the theatre, one could not criticize the Habsburg government openly and directly, and so the traditional device was used of setting the play in a foreign land and allowing the audience to infer the applicability of the crucial scenes to the situation in Vienna. The original story was set in faraway Asia (place names used include Khorasan and Kashmir), and the libretto gives a nonsense word (Quitschiwitsch) as the name of the country in question, but the name Perinet invents for the magician-ruler of this land, Bosphoro, leads h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Preliminary Matter
• Title
• Copyright
• ABBREVIATIONS
• REMARKS
• OUVERTURE
• PROLOGUE
• ACT I: THE PAINTED SERAGLIO
• ACT II: THE SERAGLIO IN ITALIAN–OTTOMAN CONTEXT
• ACT III: THE SERAGLIO IN AUSTRIAN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SINGSPIELE
• ACT IV: HAREM FANTASIES ON THE LATE EIGHTEENTH- AND EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY AUSTRIAN STAGE
• ACT V: FROM THE OTTOMAN POINT OF VIEW
• EPILOGUE
• APPENDIX