THE CAPTIVE SULTAN

Operatic Transfigurations of the Ottoman Menace after the Siege of Vienna

Introduction: Bajazet the Tenor

In 1724, as Handel was completing his opera Tamerlano for performance by the Royal Academy of Music at the King's Theater in the Haymarket, the Venetian tenor Francesco Borosini arrived in London to star in the opera as Tamerlane's vanquished enemy, the Ottoman sultan Bajazet. The historical conqueror Timur, or Tamerlane, defeated and captured the historical Bajazet (Bayezid) at the battle of Ankara in 1402. He died in 1403 as Tamerlane's captive, possibly by suicide as represented in Handel's opera. This major setback for the Ottomans could only be redressed after Tamerlane's own death in 1405 during his Chinese campaign, which was followed by an Ottoman resurgence under Bajazet's son Mehmed I, his grandson Murad II, and his great-grandson Mehmed II, who conquered Constantinople in 1453.

When the tenor Borosini came to England to sing the part of Bajazet for Handel, he was probably carrying with him an operatic score by the composer Francesco Gasparini, a setting of the libretto by the poet and Venetian patrician Agostino Piovene. This was basically the same libretto that Handel would use, though lightly adapted for him by Nicola Francesco Haym. Gasparini's Tamerlano had been performed in Venice in 1711 and was then significantly revised and revived in Reggio Emilia (near Parma) in 1719 with the prominence of the Ottoman sultan considerably enhanced and the title accordingly changed to Il Bajazet. The revision also allowed the sultan, very dramatically, to poison himself and die on stage. The tenor Borosini had performed the expanded part of Bajazet in Reggio Emilia in 1719, and he therefore had some stake in helping Handel to appreciate the importance of Bajazet's role.

Piovene's Venetian libretto, originally for Gasparini, would be set to music by some twenty different composers all over Europe during the course of the eighteenth century, alternately titled for Tamerlano or Bajazet. It was still being recomposed for performance in Venice as Bajazette by Gaetano Marinelli as late as 1799, at the century's end. Piovene's libretto of 1711, however, was not even the first Venetian version of the subject, as an earlier libretto was composed and performed as Il gran Tamerlano at the Teatro Grimani of the church of San Giovanni e Paolo in 1689. The operatic elaborations of the history of the Ottoman sultan Bajazet thus played out over the course of more than a century in Venice.

Handel in 1724 had the opportunity to tailor the part of Bajazet to Borosini's tenor skills, as demonstrated in rehearsal, but also to study the Gasparini score in which Borosini's Turkish character had already been endowed with heroic stature. When Handel's opera opened, Borosini performed the part of a noble tragic hero, as complex as any that had ever been composed for a tenor on the operatic stage; this was all the more remarkable for the fact that the character was an Ottoman sultan, whose dynastic descendants were still widely regarded as the enemies of Christendom in the early eighteenth century. Borosini himself had to be imported from Venice, because Handel did not have a tenor in his regular company, and he wanted to create a tragic tenor role that would sound particularly striking among the rival leads, the Mongol or Tartar conqueror Tamerlano and the Greek Byzantine prince Andronico, both of them performed by castrati. The figure of Bajazet, especially as conceived for Borosini, became the earliest important incarnation of the singing Turk, and numerous composers and performers would recreate the role, making the sultan sing in captivity through most of the eighteenth century and across much of the European continent.

The Drama of Bajazet in the Seventeenth Century

Operas about Turks emerged as a European phenomenon at the very end of the seventeenth century, after the siege of Vienna. They were, however, anticipated and conditioned by earlier spoken dramas on Ottoman subjects, sometimes with incidental music, and there were even some early instances of musical cantatas for singing Turks. In the mid-seventeenth century the baroque composer Luigi Rossi composed the "Lamento di Mustafà e Bajazet," a cantata in which two Ottoman princes plead in vain for their lives as they are about to be executed by their brother the sultan, in a classic instance of Ottoman political fratricide. These princes already demonstrated the musical nobility that Gasparini and Handel would invest in the tragic figure of Sultan Bajazet in Tamerlano. Rossi, who received his musical training in Naples and worked principally in Rome, came originally from Torremaggiore in Apulia, on the Adriatic Sea, looking toward the Ottoman empire. In 1656 there was performed in London, under Cromwell's Protectorate, an opera on The Siege of Rhodes, based on the historical siege by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1522. Jointly composed by several English composers to a libretto by William Davenant, and including Suleiman himself among the singing parts, The Siege of Rhodes was probably the very first British opera — though its music has not survived. In France in 1670 Molière's Le bourgeois gentilhomme was performed for Louis XIV; its exotic Turkish disguises, mock-Turkish ceremonies, and pseudo-Turkish phrases were employed to make a fool out of the titular bourgeois gentleman while also entertaining the king. The work as a whole was classified as a comédie-ballet, and was accompanied with music by Lully, including the musical composition of the Turkish scene.

The Ottoman sultan Bajazet in particular emerged as an important dramatic subject as early as the sixteenth century. Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine came to the Elizabethan stage in the 1580s, with Bajazet presented as a tyrant no less arrogant than Tamerlane himself. Before the great battle, the Ottoman sultan addresses his pashas and Janissaries, and promises not only to defeat Tamerlane but to...