Week 2
Exoticism and National Stereotypes in Baroque Music


George Frideric Handel:
Giulio Cesare in Egitto (1725)
•Exoticism or Orientalism?
•Romans vs. Egyptians?
Giulio Cesare (German Subtitles)

Ellen T. Harris, “With Eyes on the East and Ears in the West: Handel’s Orientalist Operas,”
Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2006
•Many Italian operas in London of the 1720s had exotic/orientalist plots
•Handel’s operas: 2/3=Eastern settings
•Opera companies in eighteenth-century London=commercial enterprise supported by venture
capitalists who invest in East Indian trade
•Operas support colonial expansion by depicting the “Orient” in stereotypical ways
•Ralph Locke: Music and the Exotic from Renaissance to Mozart (Cambridge University Press, 2015),
261–262: these were complex works and probably meant many different things to many different people
in eighteenth-century London…

Exoticism in Serse (Xerxes), 1738
XERXES 'Ombra mai fu' Handel - Deutsche Oper am Rhein


Exoticism in Serse (Xerxes), 1738
•Ralph Locke: Music and the Exotic from Renaissance to Mozart (Cambridge University Press, 2015),
252.
•Xerxes is presented as both tyrannical and effeminate + ridiculous in his initial love for tree
•Sarabande features: slow triple meter (supposed origin: Latin America)
•ITAL. TEXT: Ombra mai fu / Di vegetabile, / Cara ed amabile, / Soave più
•18c English TRANS.: “No, never vegetable made / A dearer and a lovelier shade.”

Molière/Jean-Baptiste Lully:
Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1670), comédie-ballet
Exoticism, esp. 2:30
La cérémonie turque (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, de Molière e Lully)

Molière/Jean-Baptiste Lully:
Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1670), comédie-ballet
National Stereotypes: Spanish, Italians, French
Di rigori armato il seno - J.B.Lully (1632 -1687)
Lully - LWV 43 - Le bourgeois gentilhomme - Ballet des Français - Finale
Ay qué locura... (Entrée des Espagnoles) - J.B. Lully (1632 -1687)

Jean-Philippe Rameau: Les Indes galantes, 1729
Act IV, “Les Sauvages:” Paris National Opera, 2006
Les Indes galantes. Les Sauvages
[Sokolov] Rameau Les Sauvages for Piano

Jean-Philippe Rameau: Les Indes galantes, 1729
Act IV, “Les Sauvages:” Paris National Opera, 2019
Rameau Cogitore - Les sauvages (Opéra de Paris, 2019)