Mamma li turchi! : percorsi esotici nell’opera italiana di primo Ottocento

Turkey, and a wider geographical area including the Near and Middle East, were long typified in western music by one sonic image: the ‘alla turca’ style, imitating the effect of the military bands of the Janissary corps, which Europe had encountered in the 18th century. At the beginning of the 19th century, the stereotypes of the ‘alla turca’ style were becoming obsolete as a result of a grooving interest in the cultures and musical heritages of the Orient, and they were increasingly confined to opera buffa, where they continued to feature for a few more decades. While literature and the fine arts renovated their language in the wake of new experiences of the Orient, music did not possess equally effective tools to provide an adequate sonic representation of those lands. It is only in the 1840s that a new phase of musical exoticism was inaugurated in France by a number of experimental endeavors. Even before then, however, attempts to represent other civilizations musically were not entirely absent, at times with innovative and spectacular results as is the case, for example, of Meyerbeer’s Il crociato in Egitto.