March 21, 2022

Mehmed the Conqueror, the Historical Maometto

March 21, 2022/ Guest User

by Gregory Moomjy

Mehmet II (Maometto), 15th-century Turkish miniature

Rossini’s Maometto Secondo is about a figure largely unknown to American audiences, who do not traditionally study the history of the Ottoman Empire in any detail. But a familiar song from the 1950s can help as a starting point. “Istanbul Not Constantinople,” inane as it is, drills one crucial fact into the listener’s brain: the capital of the Byzantine Empire, known as Constantinople in honor of its founder Constantine I, was renamed Istanbul when it fell to the Ottomans in 1453. Shortly thereafter it became the capital of their empire, and remained so until its dissolution in 1923.

Mehmed II (1432-1481)—translated to Maometto in Italian, sometimes spelled Mehmet in English—was the man responsible for the name-change immortalized in that earworm. He ruled twice, first from 1444-1446 and then from 1451-1481, when he saw the Ottoman Empire out of crisis and fulfilled a destiny foretold by the Prophet Muhammad: that Constantinople would become a bastion of Islam. During his reign, Istanbul emerged as the center of a multicultural empire.

Here are some basic background facts. The name Ottoman is actually a European corruption of “Osman.” The Ottoman Empire (1299-1923) was founded by the Turkish tribal leader Osman I, who reigned from 1299 to 1323/4. For 600 years, the empire was ruled by one family, known as the house of Osman. It is the last of three major Muslim Empires, and the only one to be a major player in European politics. At its height, the empire stretched over three continents—Europe, Asia, and North Africa. The principle duty of all Ottoman sultans was to expand the reach of Islam. To that end, the central point of a new emperor’s accession ceremony was not the donning of a crown, but the girding of a dagger on the ruler’s belt.

A Muslim empire had two religious documents at its core—the Quran and the Hadith. Believers consider the Quran to be the unerring, unadulterated word of God as told by the Prophet Muhammad. The Hadith is a collection of proverbs, anecdotes, and other commentaries about the Prophet and his life. Both sources decree that the faithful would one day conquer Constantinople. Mehmet II brought the prophecy to fruition at the age of twenty-one.

He was part of the first group of ten major sultans who helped the empire acquire all the territory that it would occupy at its zenith. The empire had risked collapse when it was defeated in 1402 at the battle of Angora (Ankara) by the Mongol leader Tamerlane. (Opera lovers may know him through Handel’s Tamerlano of 1724). Tamerlane divided the Ottoman Empire into two parts: one based in the Balkans and the other in Anatolia, or modern-day Turkey. As a result, Ottoman rulers were forced to reinvent the governing structure of the empire. Previously, the sultans collected tributes from conquered provinces that were still governed by Christian princes in the Balkans, or members of competing Muslim noble families in Anatolia. Under Mehmed II, conquered territories came to be ruled by Janissaries—soldiers conscripted from the Empire’s religious minorities, and indoctrinated to become loyal to the Sultan. After conscription as children, Janissaries converted to Islam.

Students of political science will recognize this structure of governance in the Ottoman state from Machiavelli’s The Prince. There, he contrasts the centralized authority of the Ottoman Sultanate with the monarchies of Western Europe where the crowned heads of state were sometimes captive to the interests of the nobility. Mehmed II would continue this system as he conquered further territory in the Balkans and Asia Minor. By his death in 1481, he had absorbed all the territory of the former Byzantine Empire and styled himself as its Caesar. He also built up the Ottoman Navy to combat threats like the Venetians—Maometto’s principal adversaries in the opera.

Among the advances the Ottomans under Mehmed bequeathed to military history were the use of cannons as well as that of military bands—both featured to startling effect in Rossini’s opera. (At the Siege of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottomans fired the largest cannon known to the world, the Orban Bombard.) The greatest challenges to Mehmed’s empire came from Byzantium and Venice; Negroponte, the setting of Maometto, was a Venetian colony. It was governed by Paolo Erisso, who according to one source had a daughter named Anna. The real Anna apparently had no qualms about committing suicide once the island fell to the Ottomans, and history tells us nothing of a romantic relationship between her and Mehmed. That was invented by later dramatists, following the longstanding custom of portraying noble figures who struggled to balance personal desires with their political ambitions or duties. In the world of 18th-century opera seria, these noble characters were most often shown to succeed. Even if death occurred, it was shown to be merited; the crown itself was safe, and continued in more capable or deserving hands. However, after The French Revolution of 1789 and the beheadings of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the world and the theater had to come to terms with the idea that kings were not invulnerable, nor royal houses immortal.

When Constantinople fell in 1453, it was not the city that it had been at the height of the Byzantine Empire. Its population had dwindled due to the ravages of plagues and crusades. However, Mehmed made the decision to rebuild Constantinople and make it the capital of his empire. He encouraged immigration into the city and negotiated with the nearby Genoese community, who had previously aided the Byzantines. Mehmed restored Constantinople to a vibrant cosmopolitan city.

The historical Mehmed was reputed fair to Christians, in some cases allowing rumors to circulate that he favored them as a group. This was presumably due to his desire to conquer Rome and reestablish the Roman Empire to its fullest extent. When his soldiers captured Constantinople, he allowed them three days to pillage, but stopped before major damage accrued. He famously designated the Hagia Sofia as a mosque. Dating from the reign of Justinian I (c. 482 - 565), the building is the best surviving example of Byzantine architecture. It was a museum for the past 90 years, until 2020 when President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey converted it back into a mosque.

Maometto II brings one of history’s great politicians to the stage. Many scholars concur in calling him the greatest of Sultans, as he defined the Ottoman Empire both geographically and culturally. His legacy can still be seen in present-day Turkey.

Gregory Moomjy, a musicologist and journalist based in New York City, is the cofounder and Artistic Director of Opera Praktikos

March 21, 2022

Authentic Historical Performance Practice for Audiences

March 21, 2022/ Guest User

A lot of Teatro Nuovo’s work has to do with studying “how it was done back in the day” - reading educational treatises, first-hand witness reports, composers’ letters, etc. etc. - and seeking to bring what we find to expressive life in the here and now. This is what is meant by “performance practice.”

But why should the benefits of scholarship stop at the edge of the orchestra? We also read a lot about how audiences played their part in the Bel Canto dialogue. And the good news is that authentic performance by the public is liberating. The churchly quiet that later came over “classical music” is entirely absent from what we read about its living context.

Here are a few basic guidelines:

If you are excited by what you’ve just heard, applaud - whenever you feel like it.
If you don’t feel the urge to applaud, don’t. There’s no obligation.
If you feel like praising a particular artist, the traditional cry is “brava” (for female performers) or “bravo” (for male).
If you really, really love what just happened, keep applauding until we have no choice but to stop and repeat it.
If you really, really hate something, the traditional signal is hissing or groaning noises. (We hope you won’t, but we can take it, and we need to know!)
If you like something but it puts you in the mood to hold your breath in wonder, or to ponder it in quiet contemplation, that’s fine too - let the music speak to you as it will.

All of it can be summed up in a word: Engage! Our hearts and souls are in this music, and there’s nothing we want more than to reach yours.

March 23, 2019

The Guilty Magpie?

March 23, 2019/ Guest User

The story of La Gazza Ladra turns on a series of crazy coincidences and a handful of situations that are supposed to be realistic.

The coincidences: that a serving-girl who is suspected of stealing silverware should happen to sell some non-stolen silverware to an itinerant peddler...and that it should happen to match the pieces (a fork and a spoon) that went missing from her employer...and that each should happen to be monogrammed with the same initials (her father is Fernando Villabella, her boss is Fabrizio Vinogradito)...and that she should feel unable to explain because her father is under sentence of death for deserting the army. All because dad wanted to stop by to see his girl and went ballistic when his commanding officer said “no.”

Too much, right? But audiences at the time loved improbable events conspiring to produce intense situations. For this kind of drama, coincidences are a feature, not a bug. Popular novels of similar vintage are even fuller of them - including many still respected and even beloved today. If you make a chart of the chance encounters that shape David Copperfield or Middlemarch, it will look maze-like and - in the absence of the prose - pretty ridiculous.

The situations we are supposed to consider realistic are three:

That death sentences could be imposed for such things as going AWOL from the army or stealing some silverware. All too real; life was cheap, especially the lives of commoners. England’s “Bloody Code” at the start of the 19th century had about 220 crimes punishable by execution, among them “grand larceny,” which was defined as anything worth more than twelve pence, at the time about 5% of a skilled worker’s weekly pay.
That a small-town mayor might propose commutation of a sentence in exchange for sexual favors. No problem with believing that one in our Me-Too era; it’s still going on.
That magpies are drawn to shiny objects and inclined to carry them off, thus exposing innocent serving-maids to the gallows and whole villages to convulsions of scandal and grief. This one is a little problematic.

Magpie examining hex nut (but will he pick it up?)

European folklore - not just in this opera and the popular play on which it was based - has long held that the common magpie (pica pica) carries bright trinkets to its nest. An Exeter University study in 2014 concluded that this is myth; in 64 trials with items like screws and bits of tin foil placed near clumps of nuts, only two birds took the bait, and both discarded the inedible objects immediately. Some of them even reduced their nut consumption because the alien objects apparently made them nervous.

On the other hand, the study may have been imperfect (it seems that “married” magpies like regularity in their feeding habits, and it’s possible that singletons forage more variously). And there are undeniable photographs that at least seem to show the traditional behavior - though none with anything nearly as big as a table fork.

So in this case we may have to suspend disbelief in order to take Rossini’s opera half-seriously. Please note, however, that according to Ballou’s Monthly Magazine (Boston, August 1875), a servant girl at a country manor near Lambeth was “taken into custody, on suspicion of stealing” a spoon and a pair of sugar-tongs, only to be released when they were found (along with a milk-pot!!) in a bird’s nest in the garden. The culpable party in this case was a raven (corvus corax), but I think we can accept a bit of poetic license, and need not retitle the opera Il Corvo Ladro.

September 05, 2018

Will's Record of the Week

September 05, 2018/ Guest User

Encore Verdi

This is a follow-up to last week’s survey of the singers who worked with Verdi in his last two productions, in Paris in 1894. There’s another participant who ought to be remembered - a “second cast” singer who didn’t work directly with the composer, but was the subject of interesting comments from him.

Falstaff went up in April at the Opéra-Comique, and when Verdi returned in October to mount Otello at the Opéra, Victor Maurel went over to the big theater to play Iago, and Lucien Fugère (1848-1935) took over the title role in the autumn reprise of Falstaff at the Opéra-Comique. Boito, the librettist, had apparently spoken severely of Fugère to their publisher Ricordi, and Verdi offered a gentle corrective:

Boito’s criticisms are perfectly fair, but in his judgment he forgets that of the public. All right, Falstaff moves around too much and doesn’t do Quand’ero paggio well...but he repeats it three times.

Again that encore! Strange as it seems to us, the repetition of sections that had pleased the audience was one of the main markers of success in opera in the 19th century. They couldn’t go home and hear it again on a record. If they weren’t box-holders or habitués of the gallery they may not have known when they would ever have a chance to hear it again.

The same Verdi letter notes repetitions of the laughing quartet of the Merry Wives and of Quickly’s narrative about Herne’s Oak on that particular night. From other accounts we know that the Honor Monologue, Ford’s soliloquy, Fenton’s sonnet, and Nannetta’s Song of the Fairies were often repeated in early Falstaff performances. Verdi himself regularly encored at least three sections of his Requiem when he conducted it all over Europe. There was simply a livelier two-way connection between audience and stage in those days.

Fugère, meanwhile, failed to record anything from Falstaff, and that’s a pity, because he was a charismatic interpreter. Here he is in a lively song recorded in 1902, Paul Henrion’s “Le vieux ruban,” picked because it is similar in range and spirit to the “amorous” Falstaff in his big scene with Alice Ford. The voice per se is more utilitarian than beautiful, but the use of it is expert, from the superbly clear diction to the poised head register and warm low notes to the fine-grained pianissimo trill at the end.

Fugère made about twenty records in his mid-fifties, and then - to the surprise of everyone except those who had been attending the Opéra-Comique - almost thirty more between the ages of 79 and just short of 82. His last stage appearances (as Doctor Bartolo) were made at age 85. In between, an interviewer asked him the secret of his longevity and elicited a classic response: “If a man doesn’t sing well at 83 — when will he, I’d like to know!”

Here is his very last record, the “Chanson du chevrier” from Halévy’s Le val d’Andorre, composed in the year Fugère was born and recorded on 13 May 1930.

In the meantime, two readers have made versions of the same comment on Albert Saléza, Verdi’s Paris Otello: that he sounds more like a Fenton, i.e. very lyrical and perhaps a little “light,” in his sole surviving studio recording.

This is undeniable, especially in the opening phrases of the piece he chose (“Tu che a Dio spiegasti l’ali” from Lucia di Lammermoor). There is somewhat more heft to the sound in the taxing climb to top A near the end, but it’s hard to tell much from such a primitive document. (The complete vocal portion of this dim 1898 cylinder is heard at the start of the last audio selection in last week’s post).

It’s also hard to be sure how a single recording relates to the overall span of the singer’s activity. That he was capable of delicately shaded tones in the “passaggio” area, tending towards the head-voice side, is beyond doubt - and there are moments in Otello that can benefit from that, and go begging in most performances. Did Saléza favor that facet of his singing because he was in a room and not on the stage? Or is that just the way he sang this piece? What might he have done in a whole series of records? (He did, apparently, make at least four more at the same time as the Lucia aria, all for the legendary firm of Gianni Bettini, but none has come to light in modern times.)

Saléza also appears on three of the Mapleson cylinders, recorded “Live from the Met” between 1901 and 1903. On only one of these can I glean any useful idea of his voice, but that one (a bit of the duet “Verranno a te sull’aure,” also from Lucia, sung on 2 March 1901) is interesting. The lines beginning “pensando ch’io di gemiti / mi pasco, e di dolor” are clear enough - just - to give an idea of Saléza’s E-flat at the cusp of the “passaggio.” (The prompter is as audible as the tenor: the apparatus was in his box.) Then there are two attacks on upper A-flat and a solid scale up to B-flat on “ah, su questo pegno allor.” In all these the voice sounds - marginally but distinctly - darker and heavier than on the solo cylinder.

That doesn’t prove anything, but it does raise a familiar question for students of early sound artifacts. Transposition of key was common in opera, vastly more common than it is today, and Edgardo’s final solo was a very frequent candidate for transposition. When Ricordi first issued printed orchestral parts for the opera, the whole final scene appeared twice in them, first in the keys of Donizetti’s autograph and then a half-step lower. So the possibility must be entertained that Saléza might have been singing in D-flat and not in D when he recorded his cylinder - and if it is played at a speed producing the lower key, the voice sounds, yes, darker and heavier.

There’s not a clear way to decide. As far as I know, nobody has discovered a “standard speed” for the few known Bettini cylinders. Sometimes comparison of vibrato rates reveals a sonic signature that helps us judge the proper speed for a doubtful item, but in this case we simply don’t have enough samples to go by. Without getting into the technical details, the vibrato heard on the few decipherable moments in the live duet (almost certainly sung in key) is empirically within the possible range of the voice on the Bettini cylinder as heard in either key. So in the end we must go by subjective impression.

Here is a handy comparison tool: the first lines of the solo as reproduced in D; the fragment from the live duet (played twice, and one has to listen at least twice to make any sense of it at all); and finally the same opening of the solo as reproduced in D-flat. Which is right? We have to guess, but we want to guess, because one way or the other it is an Otello voice admired by the composer of Otello.

Teatro Nuovo puts great emphasis on learning from the singers who had never heard, or heard of, microphone singing - primitive recordings from more than a century ago, forming a link to the traditions of opera’s heyday and the infinite potential of the natural, unassisted human voice. Check this space regularly for samples, and click here for some pointers on how to listen.