Mozart & Orientalism - New English Review

by Ibn Warraq (November 2009)

[1]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

‘”You who revere the

Creator of the boundless universe,

call him Jehova or God,

call him Fu, or Brahma.

Hark! Hark to the words

Ringing out through earth, moon, sun,

[9]

Freemasonry clearly answered to many of Mozart’s longings: attraction to mystery and illumination, search for knowledge and quest for beauty, fantasy and brotherhood. The Masons believed in the possibility of social transformation “and the return of humanity from a state of innocence and grace.” As Solomon concludes his chapter on Mozart’s deep commitment to Freemasonry: “A young composer’s fascination with The Arabian Nights, with Fénelon’s rationalist utopian novel, Les Aventures de Télémaque, and with every variety of literary and musical orientalism converge in the Masonic Temple, creating in its consecrated premises a miniature simulacrum of a fantastic illuminated city, casting an anticipatory beam of light from a desired future into a shadowed present. We are left without certainty, but perhaps with some room for mystery and the miraculous.”[10]

EuropeanFrenchAntoine Galland‘s Bibliothèque Orientale, ou Dictionnaire universal …des Peuples de l’Orient [Paris, 1697], completed after d’Herbelot’s death in 1695, contained an entry on Brahma</i>; and as for Turkey, any number of travelers reported back on their impressions of the Ottomans, such as Johann (Hans) Schiltberger [13811440<span style=">]; Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq [died 1592], who was Ferdinand I of Austria 's ambassador to the Ottoman EmpireSuleiman the Magnificent<span style=">; and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu [1689-1762]; while the theme of the generous and compassionate Turk, as we shall see in discussing Gluck, was quite common in the theatre, opera and ballet in mid-eighteenth century Vienna and Paris. It is far more likely that Mozart made his acquaintance of Zoroaster through the influence of Anquetil-Duperron's translations than through reading Lucian. For we know that as soon as the French version of the Avesta appeared, Johann Friedrich Kleuker [1749 -1827], Professor of Theology in the University of Riga, published a German translation of it in Leipzig and Riga between 1776 and 1777, and also, importantly, of Anquetil's historical dissertations. Anquetil had tried to show, in a memoir on Plutarch, that the data of the "Avesta" fully agree with the account of the Magian religion given in the treatise on "Isis and Osiris." Kleuker enlarged the circle of comparison to the whole of ancient literature., Il Seraglio, and cantata K.619 can be seen as reflections in art of Orientalist research.

[1] Brigid Brophy. Mozart The Dramatist. New York: Da Capo Press, 1988, pp.211-212: “Having drawn on all the world, the taste for the exotic spilled over from the decorative arts into literature, drama and opera-in all of which it might also serve the propaganda purposes of reason. China (Horace Walpole’s Letter from Xo Ho To His Friend Lien Chi At Pekin): Turkey (whose exoticism spiced Gluck’s opera Die Pilger von Mekka as well as Mozart’s own Zaide, where Mozart’s Pasha Selim keeps his seraglio, where Don Giovanni has been in pursuit of his quest, and where Candide ends his and decides to cultivate his garden): Persia (Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes</i>; the Zoroastrian touch in Sarastro [in Die Zauberflöte]): Babylon (Voltaire’s La Princesse de Babylone): Egypt (L’Oca del Cairo [Mozart’s unfinished opera buffa]; Thamos, König in Ägypten [ play by Baron von Gebler for which Mozart wrote incidental music]; Handel’s opera on the theme of Caesar and Cleopatra; Tiepolo’s pictures of the meeting between Antony and Cleopatra and of the banquet at which Cleopatra dissolved a pearl and gave it to Antony to drink; Sethos, [French novel by abbé Jean Terrasson] which provided a gloze on the dissolved pearl; and Die Zauberflöte itself): South America (where Frederick the Great set his opera [Montezuma], and where Voltaire has Candide find El Dorado): Abyssinia (the original title of Rasselas being the The Prince of Abissinia, A Tale): India (Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s La Chaumière Indienne): the Indies (it scarcely matters whether East or West, any more than it matters whether the hero of Die Zauberflöte is a Japanese or, as it is said he appears in some editions, a Javanese, prince): the civilisation of the Red Indians (who provided Voltaire with a hero [the Huron in L’Ingénu]): Mauritius (or, as it then was, under French colonisation, the île de France, which Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, who had spent some years there himself, made the paradisal setting of Paul et Virginie): even outer space (Voltaire’s Micromégas)….”

[2] Ibid.,p.214

[3] Ibid.,p.226

[4] Ibid.,p.229.The passages in square brackets are Brophy’s own footnotes.

[5] W.A.Mozart. Die Zauberflöte. Die Entführung aus dem Serail . Introduction by Brigid Brophy. New York:Universe Books, 1971, p.100.

[6] Ibid.,p.15.

[7] Brigid Brophy. Mozart The Dramatist. New York: Da Capo Press, 1988, p.187.

[8] Maynard Solomon. Mozart. A Life. New York:Harper Perennial, 1996, p.344.

[9] Solomon, op.cit.,pp.330-331.

[10] Ibid.,p.335.

[11] James Darmesteter, Introduction to Sacred Books of the East, The Zend-Avesta, Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1880, pp.xvii-xviii.

To comment on this article, please click here.

To help New English Review continue to publish interesting articles such as this, please click here.

If you have enjoyed this article by Ibn Warraq and would like to read more, please click here.