Exoticisms in Mozart
Author(s): Bence Szabolcsi
Source: Music & Letters, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Oct., 1956), pp. 323-332
Published by: Oxford University Press
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EXOTICISMS IN MOZART1
BY BENCESZABOLCSI
LET US first determine the precise meaning of what is called
" exotic" in Mozart's sense and, generally, in the eighteenth-
century sense. It is well known that German, Italian and French
music and literature2 of that time, and its operatic stage especially,
delighted in extra-European and particularly Oriental subjects.
The significance and the true background of this awakening interest
is clearly evident, in music as well as in literature: it is a demonstra-
tion against the decadent feudal world of Europe and forms part of
the arsenal of the new self-confidence of middle-class consciousness.
It represents social propaganda asserting itself through the channels
of the imagination, the senses and the heart. This was already
Montesquieu's intention when he wrote his ' Lettres persanes ', it
appeared thus as parable and warning in Voltaire's ' L'Ingenu ' and
the Spanish tales of Lesage, and its demonstrative forces gathered in
the passionate tracts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The range of
subjects, the parabolic material, became greatly enlarged: the
European no longer stood alone.
Side by side with the established and almost obligatory scenes of
Gracco-Roman antiquity now appeared Egypt-where the sym-
bolism of Freemasonry played its part-India, China, as well as
Spanish and Indian America; above all, however, over and over
again, Turkey. Opera was early in the field as an arena for the
trial of social problems; consider above all French opera-comique,
which undermined the ancienregimewith its rescue pieces, its adven-
tures, its sensibility and its sarcasm, steering almost consciously
towards the great Revolution. It is surely no accident that exotic
themes appeared precisely on that stage in a particularly striking
form. In I753 Hasse's ' Solimano ' and Jommelli's ' Bajazet' came
out simultaneously; in 1761 Monsigny wrote, at the same time as
Gluck, his 'Cadi dupe '; a year later Philidor wrote his Sancho
Panza opera; in I764 Dancourt based a libretto on Lesage for
Gluck's 'La Rencontre imprevue ', which eleven years later was
1 A paper read by Professor Szabolcsi at a conference held
during the Mozart cele-
brations forming part of the Prague Spring Festival in May and June 1956, translated by
kind permission of the Union of Czechoslovak Composers, who publish the complete
Proceedings in Czech and German.
2 The " "
slightly earlier theme of the noble savage in English literature (Aphra
Behn, Daniel Defoe, John Gay, Samuel Johnson, &c.) is a possible influence on
continental art.-ED.
323
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324 MUSIC AND LETTERS
also used by Haydn in an Italian adaptation. Voltaire's' L'Ingenu '
turned up in 1768 in the form of Gretry's opera ' Le Huron ', and as
late as 1783 appeared Gretry's major "Turkish" opera, 'La
Caravane du Caire'. Before long Turkish subjects, in particular,
made their conquest of Italian opera as well. Hermann Abert3 says:
The Italian operatic stage had known the Turk ever since the
Venetian era, when he became thoroughly familiar by way of his
numerous raids and wars; and in the Neapolitan era he was even
then nothing new either in serious or in comic opera. Comic opera
everywhere introduced Turks as cruel pashas, cunning merchants,
sly cadis, covetous guards of the harem, and so on; but before long
the picture changes under the influence of Rousseau, and the savage
Turk is replaced by the noble one; for it was an especial predilection
of the time to oppose remote peoples as a good example to the
corrupt European civilization. What still further strengthened the
position of Turkish operas was the increasing popularity of the sphere
of Oriental fairy-tale.
Such operas as Jommelli's 'Schiava liberata' and Paisiello's
'Arabo cortese' trace the same path of development that was
followed by comic opera, from the buffocomedy to the middle-class
comedielarmoyante. Not only Goldoni and Gozzi, but also English
plays and German Singspiele contributed their share in the same
direction.4
So much for the pre-history of our subject. And now, let us see
how Mozart reacted to such themes suggested to him by the spirit
of his time, and what he did with them. He is seen here, as every-
where else, to continue, to perfect and to refashion the given
material. Above all, he is not to be lured into any one-sided or false
romantic Turkishness, for here too he remains a realist in the best
sense of the term. Oriental man and his world has for him the same
strength and weakness, the same virtues and defects, the same
nobility and barbarity, as any other human being; he looks upon
him with the eyes of the critical humanist and those of the great
dramatic poet, in the same way as he sees his Egyptians, Romans
and Spaniards, wherever his subjects may take him.
What now interests us is the way in which he deals with these
things musically, by what means he gives artistic life to them; and
we notice at once that he is extremely reticent and economical in his
suggestions of local colour. We know that' Le nozze di Figaro ' and
'Don Giovanni' are laid in Spain and 'Cosi fan tutte ' in the
environs of Naples; but hardly anywhere in the music do we find a
trace of local colour, perhaps the only exception being the fandango
in 'Figaro ', the model for which he is known to have found in
3' Mozart' (I955), Vol. I, p. 766.
4 See the
study by W. Preibisch in ' Sammelbande der Internationalen Musikge-
sellschaft', Vol. X (I909).
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EXOTICISMS IN MOZART 325
Gluck's ' Don Juan ' ballet. The same may be said of' Mitridate ',
'Zaide' and' Thamos'. Mozart's essays in Oriental styles are to
be sought elsewhere.
There are altogether four works, in my opinion, where Mozart
unquestionably applied certain exoticisms; and to these we may join,
as will be seen presently, two sections of compositions of another
kind, though not without some reservations. The four works in
question are the ballet 'Le gelosie del serraglio' of I772; the
minor-mode episode in the finale of the A major violin Concerto of
1775; the alla turcasonata movement of 1778; and ' Die Entfiihrung
aus dem Serail' or, more strictly speaking, its overture and seven of
its numbers, of 178 . Also to be mentioned, apart from the so-called
'Turkish Tattoo ', which according to his letter of 26 September
1781 Mozart had used for the drinking-duet in the ' Entfiihrung',
but which appears to have been lost, are a short movement of the
unnamed " pantomime " of 1783 and lastly, of course, on a different
dramatic level, the aria of Monostatos in the second act of ' Die
Zauberfl6te '.
A study of these things reveals the fact that Mozart shaped
certain types of music in order to obtain exotic colourings, and that
these types have their identifiable models and sources. One of them
may be singled out as the " Turkish march ", slow or fast and with
a more or less pronounced element of "Janissaries music", i.e.
percussion effects. To this category belong at any rate three pieces
of the 'Gelosie' music, the rondo alla turca and parts of the
' Entfiihrung ', such as the overture and the Janissaries' choruses.
Another type is represented by the exotic love-song or romance,
which also occurs in ' Die Entfiihrung' (the song at Osmin's entry
and Pedrillo's serenade). A third is that kind of fantastic dance
music we encounter in the finale of the A major violin Concerto.
Now nearly all these types may be said to derive from known
and recognizable models on the one hand and from ethnographic
sources as yet unexplored. Not that Mozart " collected " them as
though they were material for scientific documentation. As Georges
de Saint-Foix5 has it:
Cet exotisme est a la mode du XVIIIe siecle; il ne s'agit nulle-
ment de themes venus de l'Orient; ce gouit de la turquerie entraine
seulement la mise en oeuvre d'instruments tels que la petite flute, les
tambours, timbales et autres batteries, qui donnent aux ensembles
musicaux un eclat, une couleur locale, pseudo-barbare, et c6toyant
toujours un peu le burlesque. Mozart nous declare lui-meme,
d'ailleurs, que la musique turque est destinee a traduire le comique
d'une situation.
5 W. A. Mozart'
(1936), Vol. III, p. 302.
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326 MUSIC AND LETTERS
To dismiss this element in Mozart so simply and unequivocally as
lighthearted toying, however, is hardly admissible; after all, he was
intent on tracing an alien world with its strange peculiarities, and
for this he required the means of conjuring up distant things in the
imagination of his hearers and means, therefore,capable of forming
such associationsin the common musical consciousnessof the time.
The ballet 'Le gelosie del serraglio', known only by fragments
to-day, was written in 1772 at Milan to a scenario by Noverre and
contained thirty-two dance numbers. Abert6 sees reminiscencesof
" Austrian, Bohemian and Hungarian folk music " in several of its
pieces; Mueller von Asow7 points out seven dances as containing
Turkish colouring. The number seems to be exaggerated, but it
is quite true that several pieces echo eastern Europeanfolk melody.
Thus Nos. 22 and 23 represent a type familiar from Hungarian
and Bohemian dance music of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries:
Ex. 1.
ftr tr tr ?tr 1tr tr
^?u:rr2C?nr tr!
irIrr
I^ it i f T t . rt_
Ex. 2.
-r IY
TX 1i:rr r-, I r rr L
-^fcrff MOr
T
?f I*\
" I'-+I v
It must, however, be pointed out that this kind of dance music was
by no means a novelty for Mozart any longer at that time, for he
had already noted such things in his childhood, as for example
No. 5 in his London music-book of I764. More significant is the
finale of this ballet, the theme of which Mozart transferredthree
years later into the finale of his A major violin Concerto, without
altering the original tune or even the key:
6 Op. cit., Vol. I, p. 229.
7 'Briefe und Aufzeichnungen W. A. Mozarts' (I942), pp. I50-51.
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EXOTICISMS IN MOZART 327
Ex. 3.
Whence came such melodies and rhythms ? Browsing in the scores
of Italian eighteenth-century operas we cannot fail to get the
impression that it was already the practice of composers to make use
of definite expressive resources to match exotic situations (e.g. the
" Gypsy" operas) and only to touch them up freshly from time to
time. Among such fixed formulas was, for instance, the melodic
figuration familiar to us from the rondo alla turca: basses of even
quavers, irregular, jerking modulations (with occasional excursions
into the Dorian or Lydian), a peculiar form of sequence, terraced
dynamics, certain cadential forms, and so on. They are all found
in Mozart's music.
The problem of the A major violin Concerto of I775 is particu-
larly curious and complicated. We all know that the brightly
radiant minuet of the finale is interrupted by a sinister exotic episode
in the minor. Its thematic features are these:
i. A Gypsy-like figure with an ending in fourths and fifths in
the manner of a fanfare and a middle section of its own;
2. A motif of leaping triads;
3. A motion of rising and falling fourths, filled up chromatically
(a favourite device of Mozart's altogether8);
4. A passage of dance-like figures with a conspicuous interval of
a third;
5. Return of 2.
6. A motif of shakes beginning with narrow intervals;
7. A chromatic transition related to 3 and leading to-
8-Io. Return of I-3.
Now three of these motifs are known to us from elsewhere: No. i
appears in the finale of a string Quartet by Dittersdorf (No. 5, in
Eb major), while Nos. 2 and 6 were taken over from the ' Gelosie '
ballet music (see Exx. I and 3 above). The identity of Mozart's
Gypsy-like passage with Dittersdorf's theme:
Ex. 4.
I^, "p I . t_\
J_ : lu_rr r ri rIrl I
is as clearly evident as that of the passages resembling the ' Gelosie '
music:
8
Abert, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 329.
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328 MUSIC AND LETTERS
Ex. 5.
Dittersdorf's string quartets did not appear until 1788, in
Vienna, and in default of a precise chronology of his chamber music
it is impossible to decide whether he had not written this work
earlier and whether the episode in question, or rather its musical
raw material, was not taken down as early as 1767-68, when
Dittersdorf was in the service of the Bishop of Nagyvarad (Gross-
wardein), and thereforelived in Hungary. The fact is that this tune
contains more than one highly characteristic feature of a type of
Hungarian dance music which developed at that time-the so-called
Verbunkos.Michael Haydn, who had for a time been Dittersdorf's
predecessorat Nagyvarad, left there as early as 1762 for Salzburg,
where he was acquainted with and up to a point esteemed by the
Mozart family, though not on terms of intimate friendship with
them. His relations with Hungary, or at any rate with Hungarian
music, do not seem to have ceased with his return to Austria, for he
wrote whole symphonic movements in Hungarian style as late as
I780. It is thus no very hazardous guess to attribute Mozart's
feeling for such music to the influence of Michael Haydn.
The origin of the other motifs in this rondo episode is even more
obscure, but it may certainly be said that the passage numbered 4
above also seems to derive from Gypsy music or from the Verbunkos
repertory. But the conspicuousleap of a third is connected with the
Turkish affectationsof the time; and we know that it appearsalso in
the coda of the rondo alla turca,although not till 1784, i.e. six years
after the compositionof this piece, on the occasion of its publication.
More abundant are the sourcesof the music for' Die Entfuhrung
aus dem Serail '. No comparisonswith current folk music have as
yet been attempted, and Ulibishev alone pointed to Russian songs
which Mozart might have heard at Prince Galitsin's. On the other
hand, Mozartian literature has repeatedly drawn attention to a
dependence on Gluck's ' La Rencontre imprevue ' (I764), especially
of Mozart's overture and Janissaries' choruses. And indeed, the
resemblance between the two overturesis striking, as a specimen of
Gluck's will show:
Ex. 6.
x"e (' e Ir ' t | -rL._~J2
r '5I
4#e"eq ~ ~ il: H I
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EXOTICISMS IN MOZART 329
Also to be considered are such studies as those of Schenk and
Breazul9, and in some instances even printed models, like the
ethnographical work ofJoseph Sulzer (1781), perhaps. But I should
like to cite another operatic work which seems so far to have been
overlooked in this connection: Joseph Haydn's opera buffa 'Lo
speziale' of 1768. At the end of this opera appear caricatured
Turks to the accompaniment of a Turkish march:
Ex. 7.
i...5
1_t, 1
i7_ . i__'i ,1 . 'l' '- ' ' ,.
the leaping thirds, harmonic jerks and exotic figuration of which are
known to us from Gluck's "Turkish" music in 'La Rencontre
imprevue:
Ex. 8.
glrfm7
:v(.7-7frt $1i
as well as from another Turkish march by Haydn in the Italian
version of that opera (L'incontro improviso', I775), and from
Mozart's rondo alla turca (a) and' Entftihrung' (b):
Ex. 9a , _
Ex. 9b
The thirds also appear in a Turkish march in Neefe's opera
'Adelheit von Veltheim' (I 780):
EX. 10.
@#i.d j: )lFFTj 1f
To all this must be added the fact that Hungarian folk-music
research discovered some twenty years ago, in several villages of
the Hungarian lowland plain, a very curious type of masked dance,
9 These had been mentioned at the Prague conference by the Rumanian delegate,
Prof. Zeno Vancea, as Prof. Szabolcsi acknowledged.-ED.
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330 MUSIC AND LETTERS
called Torokos (literally alla turca), the traditional melodic shape of
which, still surviving to-day, in my opinion shows a striking resem-
blance to the Gluck-Haydn-Mozart type of Turkish march music,
The earliest written folk-dance tune is known to me from a manu-
script music-book dated 1786; it is there entitled ' Turcie '.10 Here,
for comparison with the Gluck, Haydn, Mozart and Neefe examples
shown above, are two versions of the Hungarian Trokiis, as noted
down in 1786 and in 1937:
Ex. 11.
@#"R f' I
'
'' ' -''''-
Ir
Ex. 12.
T-- I-i'. ll.
*(completed from variants)
The earlier form has never been published; the second, which comes
from Kunszentmikl6s, appeared in the journal 'Ethnographia'
(i937, p. 8I).
How tunes of this kind, which seem to have preserved genuinely
Turkish march or dance melodies that actually existed and were
heard in this form, reached the Viennese masters is unknown, but
the fact does not in itself appear improbable or enigmatic. Gypsy
music, folk dance and folksong, after all, had travelled westward
from Hungary or by way of Hungary to Vienna and beyond as
early as the seventeenth century. In any case, it is remarkable
enough that such folk elements of eastern Europe should have left
their traces precisely in the works of the great Viennese classics.
Finally, let us consider those romantic songs and romances whose
lightly exotic tunes turn up in the 'Entfihrung': e.g. Osmin's
"Trallalera " and Pedrillo's serenade. As regards the latter, Abertl1
points out similar curiosities in the work of Monsigny, Philidor,
Galuppi and Paisiello; but I would rather emphasize the fact that
Mozart's attitude towards folk music still remains an almost
10 MS.
2697 in the Szechenyi Library, Budapest.
1 Op. cit., Vol. I, p. 795.
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EXOTICISMS IN MOZART 33I
unexplored subject, and that in particular we know next to nothing
about what he heard and memorized in Italy. Here I should like
to quote four Italian folksongs side by side with the romance tunes
of Osmin and Pedrillo12:
Ex. 13a
Oddone, I, 70 (orig. A major)
I7 IJJmi4J J I7 7-
Ex. 13b
(Osmin)
L:i 1 ^ i'L~^j'iiPI
! .
Ex. 14a
Oddone, II, 53
Ex. 14b
(Osmin)
Ex. 15a
Oddone, I, 78 (orig. C major)
i
Ii
i
L UL! I-r.LLJ' 1 r . .
Ex. 15b
(Pedrillo)
Ex. 16a
Levi 99 (orig. A Phrygian)
Ex. 16b
(Pedrillo)
y^nt I ^T ^ujip ^IJ
The close resemblance in style and inspiration is evident at once,
without detracting from Mozart's wonderfully personal manner.
Such are the experiences shown by Mozart's creative work
12From E. Oddone, 'Canzoniere popolare italiano' (Milan, Rome, Naples,
Palermo), Vol. I (19I7), 70, 87, Vol. II (1923), 53; E. Levi, 'Per i vostri bambini'
(Rome, Turin, I906), 99.
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332 MUSIC AND LETTERS
which we should study more closely for their far-reachingsignificance
than has been done hitherto. All this was elevated by him to the
level of an art unique in its kind, and from the first it meant more to
him than mere toying with superficialcolouring or simple means of
humour. Mozart's " exoticisms" have their own value of reality
and are thus far more than just philological quotations or curious
excursionsinto foreign domains. They are part of his all-embracing
understanding of life, and in his work became the living pulse, the
flesh and blood of dramatic action, the image of our world. Like
everything else, they gave him a clue to his knowledge and his
delineation of mankind; they are a spring in the wonderful
mechanism, a pillar in the grandiose edifice of his dramatic music.
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