Introduction

Orientalism and its Relation to Music and

Musical Representation

You wake in me each bestial sense, you make me what I would not be.
Oscar Wilde, ‘The Sphinx’, 1894

I dare say that the highly civilised lady reading this will smile at an old fool of a hunter’s
simplicity when she thinks of her black bead-bedecked sister … And yet, my dear young
lady, what are those pretty things round your own neck? – they have a strong resemblance,
especially when you wear that very low dress, to the savage woman’s beads. Your habit of
turning round and round to the sound of horns and tom-toms, your fondness for pigments
and powders, the way in which you love to subjugate yourself to the rich warrior who
has captured you in marriage, and the quickness with which your taste in feathered head-
dresses varies, – all these things suggest touches of kinship; and remember that in the
fundamental principles of your nature you are quite identical.
H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain, 1887

This book examines character stereotypes of ‘Orientals’ played out on the British
musical stage and alongside this the ways in which music was invoked in popular
fiction and artworks to represent Others and to differentiate the Westerner from
these Others. It looks at issues of orientalism, otherness, gender and sexuality that
arise in artistic British representations of non-European musicians during the long
nineteenth century. Depictions of the musical non-European appear within examples
of many art-forms in this era, and this book focuses on case studies of musical stage
works, fictional literature, book illustration, ‘high art’ and photography as illustrating
examples of this overarching trend, exploring aspects of the portrayals of the musical
‘Orient’ and Other which move between the different artworks and art-forms.
The establishment of a theoretical framework is essential to orientalist studies, as the
theoretical considerations in this area are intricate, and (at times) even contradictory,
thus it is important to establish which aspects of the theories of orientalism will be
used to analyse primary materials, as will be done in this introductory section. This
book uses a group of intertwined theoretical ideas, (primarily) taken from orientalist
theory, post-colonial studies, art theory, culture studies, musicology, gender studies
and literary theory; thus there is no single theory running through the book, but
aspects of these theories interweave creating a theoretical framework within which
the case studies can be more broadly contextualized and explored.

 Such work incorporating various theoretical strands is becoming more prominent,

with recent publications including Phyllis Weliver’s Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction,
1860–1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home (Aldershot:
 Orientalism and Representations of Music
This book focuses on examples of arts that were popular, that is works that were
not only commercially successful and widely disseminated, but which were aimed
to suit the preferences and financial means of a wider general public. The examples
of the popular arts used in this book were primarily created by upper middle-class
artists, however they were aimed to be understandable to and appeal to a broad
audience, not just specialists. As the works were generally widespread and accessible
to a large audience, and were consumed by people from different social ‘classes’,
any attempt to apply ‘class’ theories to this study would be more of an attempt to
impose external ideas, than a natural outcome of the materials studied.
Although opera is normally considered a ‘high art’ form, the case studies here
considered were for popular, mass consumption and could only broadly be referred
to as operas, hence my employment of the term ‘musical stage works’ – they were
produced more for their commercial than artistic value. Even the examples of visual
‘high art’ discussed in Chapter 10 were aimed at a wider public who attended the
increasingly busy art galleries and subscribed to the many periodicals that reproduced
‘high art’ images for mass consumption. The seeming escapism of art-forms like
the artworks, romances and musical stage works here discussed actually frequently
expresses the underlying concerns and pressures (spiritual, sexual, and cultural) of
Victorian life, and it is such influences that this book explores in relation to the
representation of the musical Other and ‘Orient’. These mediums frequently (and
often unconsciously) convey ideas that were influential to the mainstream at the
time. This book considers the long nineteenth century as roughly embracing the years
from 1790 to 1914 and the start of World War I, so cutting across the (frequently
arbitrary) segmentation of this period into the Romantic, Victorian and Edwardian
eras and instead creating an opportunity to discuss broader issues of the Other and
‘Orient’ in relation to music in this period.

The Other

Due to the unavoidable involvement of a person within their own culture, the apparent
‘norms’ of their home society usually become naturalized so giving opportunity ‘to
other’ those who do not conform to these standards. The term ‘ideology’ is employed
in this book to describe ‘norms’ that are accepted or created by a cultural group, or a
particular individual. As soon as a group of people are viewed as ‘different’, whether
because of their sexuality, ‘race’, gender, religious beliefs or ‘class’, mistruths and

Ashgate, 2000) and Derek B. Scott’s From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
 Throughout this study, by ‘artists’ I mean composers and writers as well as visual
artists.
 Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (London:
Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 43.
 A few of the case studies date from after this, however their spirit continues as that
of the long nineteenth century, rather than connecting with more twentieth-century ideals.
 Reina Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem
(London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), p. 252.
 Orientalism and its relation to music 
fancies about them rapidly grow and are expressed in images of otherness, which
are culturally implicated and often signify misunderstanding leading to fear. The
idea of the Other is an important aspect of orientalist criticism; in othering a group
of people, a culture often projects things which they fear as well as characteristics
that they dislike onto them.
The ‘Orient’ is one of the most prevalent images of otherness in the European
consciousness and although othering occurs in all cultures, the power (im)balance
between Europe and its Others in the long nineteenth century (and beyond) makes
orientalism a distinct and dangerous form of this practice. Even though the
stereotypes and prejudices of ‘Orient’ change with time and place, these processes
of othering persist into the twenty-first century with the ongoing influences of the
systems and beliefs associated with imperial and orientalist practices. It is important
to understand the ways that other cultures are ‘filtered’, as these can demonstrate
much about (as well as have influence upon) the relationship between Britain and its
Others and act as an expression of associated prejudices and fantasies. Prejudices
and the depictions of ‘Orient’ are often subtle and unconsciously influenced so that
they could easily be (mis)taken for ‘factual’ descriptions.
Although the focus of this book is presentations of the ‘Oriental’ Other,
discussions of the male African Other in Chapters 6 and 9, and the South American
Other in Part I have been included. This is because these different forms of othering
occur alongside the more specifically ‘Oriental’ ones, within the same works or in
other works by the same artist, so it seemed pertinent to include discussions of these
representations. The term ‘Oriental’ has not been employed in descriptions of these
examples, as it is not applicable, but they are discussed in the context of ‘racial’
othering in a broader context.

Basic definitions of orientalism

Different individuals reacted to the ‘Orient’ (real or imagined) in differing ways, and
the fact that the British Victorian ‘Orient’ was a fractured entity with many different
‘Orients’ conceived, believed and depicted, complicates any study of orientalism.
To generalize, orientalism is a component of a mismatched power struggle between
East and West: through orientalist beliefs and depictions, the East was weakened
and more easily mastered. Edward Said’s (1935–2004) book Orientalism of 1978
is seminal to any discussion of definition in the field,10 however definitions within

 Benita Parry, Delusions and Discoveries: India in the British Imagination, 1880–
1930 (London: Verso, 1998), p. 31.
 Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin
Books, 1995 [1978]), p. 1.
 Nicholas Thomas, ‘Anthropology and ‘Orientalism’’, Anthropology Today, 7/2 (April
1991): 6–7.
 Laura Nader, ‘Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Control of Women’, Cultural
Dynamics, 2/3 (1989): 329.
10 Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London:
Routledge, 1995), p. 159.
 Orientalism and Representations of Music
orientalism studies are diverse and sometimes contradictory. This section attempts to
provide a brief overview of some of the central aspects that define orientalism.
In an area in which the ‘Orient’ itself is not a fixed geographical space, the
definitions of the practices of orientalism inevitably vary. Said concentrates on the
‘Middle East’ as the ‘Orient’, however Ziauddin Sardar, in his 1999 book called
Orientalism, asserts that ‘There simply has never been a definite object that is the
Orient; the Orient is merely a pattern book from which strands can be taken to
fashion whatever suits the temper of the times in the West’;11 this wider definition of
the ‘Orient’ has been used in this book, and includes Asia, Islamic North Africa, the
‘Middle East’ and Turkey. In his work Said implies that orientalist sentiment is caused
by imperialist greed and influence, however Richard King proposes a broader idea
of orientalism by noting that orientalist thought is both influential on non-imperial
European nations (his example being Germany), and focused onto countries that were
never part of a European empire (including Japan).12 ‘Knowledge’ of the ‘Orient’ is
frequently used to enhance the sense of worth of the European, thus orientalism is
‘a constructed ignorance, a deliberate self-deception, which is eventually projected
on the Orient.’13 The assessment of individual works on the ‘Orient’ adds to broader
discussions of the trends in orientalist thought,14 and the case studies here discussed
depict many of the overarching themes and developments in British ideas of their
Others in the long nineteenth century.
Orientalism protects the ‘Occident’ (or Western world) from the analysis of self
that is integral to a true engagement with other cultures.15 Through this ‘elaborate
project of displacement and self-invention’,16 and the fictionalization of the Other,
Europeans actually reveal more about their own fears and desires than anything
about the Other culture that they are attempting/claiming to portray; as Meyda
Yeğenoğlu writes, orientalism ‘is about the cultural representation of the West to
itself by way of a detour through the other.’17 In line with Saidian thought, Ziauddin
Sardar astutely observes that ‘The history of Orientalism is the history of the Western
self, its ideas, doings, concerns and fashions, and it is present in all its forms whether
overt or covert.’18 For instance he cites the example of the Victorian explorer Richard
Burton who attempted to confirm the fantasies of the Arabian Nights in his ‘reality’
of the ‘Orient’.19 For Burton, like for many Europeans, the ‘Orient’ proffered all the

11 Ziauddin Sardar, Orientalism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999), p. 53.

12 Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and ‘The Mystic
East’ (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 85.
13 Sardar, Orientalism, p. 4.
14 King, Orientalism and Religion, p. 89.
15 Jayant Lele, ‘Orientalism and the social sciences’, in Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter
van der Veer (eds), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p. 59. Cited in King, Orientalism and Religion, pp. 85–6.
16 Edward Ziter, The Orient on the Victorian Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003), p. 196.
17 Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 1.
18 Sardar, Orientalism, p. 16.
19 Ibid., p. 43.
 Orientalism and its relation to music 
illicit pleasures of ‘deviant’ sexuality (particularly sadomasochism); like many of
his contemporary travellers Burton aimed to relieve his repressed sexuality in the
‘Orient’,20 projecting ‘every imaginable kind of sexual perversion onto the Orient.
Burton presented Eastern women as sexual objects who were capable of infinite
varieties of copulation and deserved equally infinite contempt’.21 These stereotypes
represented all that was feared, and yet desired, by Westerners in the East.
According to Said, orientalism is ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring,
and having authority over the Orient’.22 When discussing Western scholars Said
contends that Orientalists considered peoples in ‘large collective terms’ or ‘abstract
generalities’, and had no interest in discussing individual ‘Orientals’.23 The Orientalist
travelling outside of Europe usually held many preconceptions and prejudices,24
but Said asserts that ‘In all cases the Orient is for the European observer … the
Orientalist ego is very much in evidence, however much his style tries for impartial
impersonality.’25 Said’s statements are frequently this strong (in this case maintaining
that all Orientalists believe something), leading some of his contemporaries to
censure his own generalizing tendencies. This book does not address the issue of
whether or how much orientalism affected all Europeans and their views of the
‘Orient’, but presents a number of case studies in which it is an active element.
Said also asserts that the ‘Orient’ was ‘almost a European invention’;26 this
somewhat ambiguous statement has led to conflicting interpretations: that the
‘Orient’ did not exist outside of European discourse or that Europe misrepresented
an ‘Orient’ that was truly there. Robert Young highlights this indistinctness in Said’s
arguments, pointing out that if there is no actual ‘Orient’ how can any account of
it be considered a misrepresentation, as it must be based purely on fantasy.27 Such
confusion exacerbates the arguments surrounding orientalist theory. This book
assumes that the ‘Orient’ as a geographical space is a fiction created by and for
Europeans, and that there is no true single collective ‘Orient’, but instead an area that
incorporates numerous distinct cultures. This investigation also presupposes that
different individuals reacted to this imagined ‘Orient’ in differing ways, and that the
British Victorian ‘Orient’ was a multiple construction incorporating many different
‘Orients’ conceived, believed and depicted.
Nineteenth-century orientalist studies tended to focus upon studying the past of
‘Oriental’ cultures; by asserting that the zenith of non-European cultures had already
passed they made the ‘degeneration’ of the ‘Orient’ seem to be unavoidable.28 The
‘Orient’ was frequently studied through linguistic or religious historical inspection,

20 Sardar, Orientalism, p. 16.

21 Ibid., p. 43.
22 Said, Orientalism, p. 3.
23 Ibid., pp. 154–5.
24 Ibid., p. 52.
25 Ibid., p. 158.
26 Ibid., p. 1.
27 Robert J.C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, 2nd edn
(London: Routledge, 2004), p. 170.
28 Sardar, Orientalism, p. 60.
 Orientalism and Representations of Music
meaning that Arabic, for example, was studied as if it were a dead language.29 In
this way scholars helped to perpetuate the image of the unchanging ‘Orient’, and
so historical orientalism became a central facet of orientalist thought. Although
this is particularly true of the ‘high arts’, popular works more often focused on a
contemporary Other or expressed the middle-ground of a timeless ‘Orient’, as is
demonstrated in many of the case studies in this book.
By rationalizing the ‘Orient’ within a Western framework, Orientalists attempted
to de-mystify, and thus control, the East. Sardar maintains that the orientalist vision
is grounded in two ‘simultaneous desires: the personal quest of the Western male
for Oriental mystery and sexuality and the collective goal to educate and control
the Orient in political and economic terms.’30 To assist this quest for control, the
‘natives’ of Other places are represented as ‘degenerate’ in order to validate conquest,
but as redeemable enough to excuse Europe’s continuing interference.31 The old
adage ‘knowledge is power’ is particularly apt in orientalism, and irrefutably, power
establishes the representations that come to be accepted as ‘real’.32 Thus many
modern theorists of orientalism consider academia and indeed the arts to have
enabled or at least aided political control in the European empires and the wider
‘Orient’; to use Fred Halliday’s metaphor, ‘if you plan to rob a bank, you would be
well advised to have a pretty accurate map of its layout, know what the routines and
administrative practices of its employees are, and, preferably have some idea of who
you can suborn from within the organization’.33
This brief overview makes it apparent that despite the volume of writing emerging
on orientalist theory, as yet there is no single or all-encompassing definition of the term
‘orientalism’. The field is still a comparatively new one, however critical awareness is
constantly increasing, as is the variety and specificity of definitions. Said nevertheless
remains a decisive influence, something of which he himself was proud.

Orientalism and exoticism

Having established the definitions of orientalism that apply to this study, it is relevant
to briefly discuss exoticism and the critical difference between these two concepts.
Exoticism is the evocation of ‘a place, people or social milieu’34 that is ‘perceived
as different from home by the people making and receiving the exotic cultural
product’, creating something that is different, colourful and ‘suggestive’ of another

29 Sardar, Orientalism, p. 60.

30 Ibid., pp. 1–2.
31 John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 12.
32 Ibid., p. 75.
33 Fred Halliday, ‘“Orientalism” and its critics’, British Journal of Middle Eastern
Studies, 20/2 (1993): 160.
34 Ralph P. Locke, ‘Exoticism’. Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy, <www.grovemusic.
com> (Accessed 27 May 2006).
 Orientalism and its relation to music 
culture.35 Thus on a basic level, certain aspects of orientalism could be considered
as exoticisms also. However the two concepts differ in their usage; exoticism is an
artistic tool, whereas orientalism is charged with cultural and/or political agendas.
For example Claude Debussy (1862–1918) uses non-European musical elements in
his works, particularly ideas inspired by the Indonesian gamelan, ‘in such a way as
to minimize their specific geographical and cultural associations’;36 Debussy adds
unusual colour to his work with these influences, but he does not do this as a critique
of the culture from which the ideas were taken. This is the essential difference
between exoticism and orientalism: whilst exoticism enables artists (in whatever
art-form) to broaden their artistic palatte and to explore new artistic mediums,
images and styles, orientalism depicts another culture in such a way as to create
comment, or to highlight (often negative) difference. The former appreciates and
embraces cultural diversity, whereas the latter (generally) disparages or criticizes it.
Even though orientalism may use elements of exoticism within its processes, these
concepts remain extremely different in their aims.

Orientalism, sexuality and gender studies

Central to this book are the ways in which constructions of gender and sexuality
interplay with orientalism and how musical representations play a part in the
portrayals of these ideas. One aspect of the ‘Orient’ and sexuality that most fascinated
Europeans in this era, and about which there were many stories and fantasies created,
was the ‘Oriental’ woman. According to Said ‘the Orient was a place where one
could look for sexual experience unobtainable in Europe’.37 Indeed sexuality is an
important aspect of colonial discourse, as fantasy and desire are fundamental aspects
in orientalist and colonial relationships with the Other. The primary focus of Western
views of feminine sexuality in the ‘Orient’ was the harem; the film academic Mary
Hamer writes how ‘Orientalism is seductive: it offers forms for European pleasure
… where absolute power can create a space for the play of sexualities – the eunuch,
the lesbian, the slave – that are constrained elsewhere.’38 Fantasies of the harem
are played out across all of the British arts in the long nineteenth century, as is
demonstrated in the examples used in this book.
Not only was female ‘Oriental’ sexuality a preoccupation, but in fact the ‘Orient’
as a geographical space was frequently viewed as metaphorically sensual and was
nearly always understood in feminine terms; consequently in European imagery,
the ‘Orient’ has been conceptualized not only as racialized, but as feminized too.39

35 Ralph P. Locke, ‘Exoticism and Orientalism in Music: Problems for the Worldly
Critic’, in P.A. Bové (ed.), Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 266.
36 Locke, ‘Exoticism’ <www.grovemusic.com>.
37 Said, Orientalism, p. 190.
38 Mary Hamer, ‘Timeless Histories: A British Dream of Cleopatra’, in Matthew
Bernstein (ed.), Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film (London: I.B. Tauris Publishers,
1997), p. 271.
39 Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies, p. 73.
 Orientalism and Representations of Music
Thus the ‘Orient’ was often viewed through the fantasized metaphor of the Eastern
woman. Meyda Yeğenoğlu believes that critically, it is imperative to subject the
discourse of ‘Orient’ to a reading that explores this sexualization, as she asserts that
the European understandings of ‘Orient’ and the women therein are interrelating
frameworks.40 Even when a work does not directly represent a sexualized ‘Oriental’
woman, themes of Other sexuality can proliferate. The film theorist Ella Shohat
considers one aspect of this idea – the veil – an idea also explored by Meyda
Yeğenoğlu.41 Shohat asserts that the ‘Orient’ is frequently presented metaphorically
through the image of the veiled woman, and that ‘[t]he inaccessibility of the veiled
woman, mirroring the mystery of the Orient itself, requires a process of Western
unveiling for comprehension’. The process of unveiling the ‘Oriental’ woman came
‘to allegorise the Western masculinist power of possession, that she, as a metaphor for
her land, becomes available for Western penetration and knowledge’.42 So alongside
the feminization and sexualization of ‘Oriental’ cultures and geography, ‘Oriental’
women can be used in texts as a metaphor for the ‘Orient’, thus the intertwined
issues of women and the sexualization of the East are essential in understanding
European views of the ‘Orient’.
In recent scholarship of orientalism there are also increasing calls for the
consideration of the influence of gender upon European depictions of the Other.43
Gender is no longer considered to be biological fact, but is now recognized as
incorporating networks of culturally learnt and supported roles, thoughts and ideas,
all of which affect artworks and cultural artefacts. Reina Lewis has been influential
in her analyses of works created by female Orientalists, criticizing Said for never
questioning ‘women’s apparent absence as producers of Orientalist discourse or as
agents within colonial power’ in Orientalism.44 She recognizes that just as orientalist
texts are influenced by the preceding bodies of work on ‘Orient’, they are also
influenced by concepts of gender at the time of their creation,45 and that women’s
texts are ‘specifically gendered because of the social and psychological restraints
on their experience and representation of the Orient’.46 However Billie Melman
warns against a misguided belief that European women were not guilty of orientalist
prejudice, as they frequently subscribed to European ‘values’ including a belief in
‘progress’ and an assurance of cultural supremacy; thus women’s presentations of

40 Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies, p. 26.

41 Ibid., p. 44.
42 Ella Shohat, ‘Gender and Culture of Empire: Toward a Feminist Ethnography of
the Cinema’, in Matthew Bernstein (ed.), Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film (London:
I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1997), pp. 32–3.
43 Clare Midgley, ‘Introduction: Gender and Imperialism: Mapping the Connections’,
in Clare Midgley (ed.), Gender and Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1998), p. 10.
44 Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London:
Routledge, 1996), p. 18.
45 Ibid., p. 33.
46 Ibid., p. 184.
 Orientalism and its relation to music 
‘Orient’ and Empire are not a ‘separate tradition’, but gender-influenced depictions
within the body of European works on ‘Orient’.47
In any historical moment or cultural community, a system of gender is established
which lays out the terms of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ gender behaviours, of what is
acceptable and what is not. Gender roles in Other communities were often misunderstood
as they were different from British normalized ‘standards’, however the ‘Orient’ and
Empire could also be used to reaffirm British ideas of their own gendering; ‘Oriental’
men were often portrayed as warmongering and violent, embodying everything that
the British ‘gentleman’ did not. This is investigated by John Tosh in his work on
masculinity and Empire, and explored in Chapter 6 of this book.

Interdisciplinarity and orientalism

Orientalist works incorporate belief systems that overarch multiple aspects of

cultural production and hence benefit interdisciplinary study. The ethnomusicologist
Inge Boer considers interdisciplinarity an essential aspect of orientalist criticism in
musicology:

Orientalism identified as discourse makes it possible, even imperative, to transcend the

boundaries between disciplines. As a form of knowledge, Orientalism surpasses text-
image divisions, for example, and hence distinctions between literature and art history as
separate disciplines engaged in Orientalism. Multiple crossings and connections knit an
intertextuality that calls forth more interdisciplinary work on Orientalism.48

Thus the interdisciplinary study of orientalist art productions is beginning to have a

high profile in some musicological, academic spheres.
Despite this increasing popularity of interdisciplinary frameworks within many
of the arts (including music), the critical consideration of interdisciplinarity remains a
small body of writing (often highly contextually specific). A distinction can be made
between multidisciplinary approaches which borrow ideas from other disciplines in
order to adapt and build upon existing methods and theories within a discipline, and
interdisciplinarity which involves the ‘melding of concepts, methods and theoretical
frameworks coming from different disciplines’.49 Bill Readings in The University
in Ruins (1996) and Joe Moran in Interdisciplinarity (2002) both discuss how
the criticism of academic disciplines as restrictive is as old as the separation into
disciplines.50 The term ‘interdisciplinary’ emerged ‘within the context of these

47 Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918
(Hong Kong: The University of Michigan Press, 1992), p. 17.
48 Inge E. Boer, ‘Introduction: Imaginative Geographies and the Discourse of
Orientalism’, in Inge E. Boer (ed.), After Orientalism: Critical Entanglements, Productive
Looks (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), p. 13.
49 Yvonne Rogers, Mike Scaife and Antonio Rizzo, Interdisciplinarity: An Emergent or
Engineered Process? Cognitive Science Research Paper 556 (Brighton: University of Sussex,
February 2003), pp. 4–5.
50 Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (London: Harvard University Press, 1996),
p. 89, and Joe Moran, Interdisciplinarity (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 14.
10 Orientalism and Representations of Music
anxieties’ as early as the mid-1920s and became commonly used in academia in
the humanities and social sciences directly following the Second World War.51 Yet
three-quarters of a century later, there is still little theoretical literature considering
the concept. Moran cites many figures and schools as examples of working
interdisciplinarity (even if they never utilized the term themselves), including
Sigmund Freud (p. 97), Charles Darwin (p. 162), structuralists such as Roland Barthes
(p. 85), the new historicists (p. 138), queer theorists (p. 108) and post-colonialists
including Said (p. 168). As well as embracing a more ‘traditional search for a wide-
ranging, total knowledge’, interdisciplinarity can include a fundamental questioning
of knowledge and the ways in which we attempt to organize it.52

Interdisciplinary influences

Derek B. Scott’s frequently interdisciplinary work has been influential on this

book, primarily his several publications on orientalism but also his recurrent focus
on popular music in nineteenth-century Britain.53 This book likewise focuses on
popular artworks intended for mass consumption by an urban general public, an area
of exploration that has become acceptable to traditional academic musicology in the
last few decades. Another area that has risen to prominence during this period is the
consideration of women, gender and music, a number of publications of which have
encouraged this study, including Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective
(1987),54 Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture
(1994)55 and Derek Hyde’s New-Found Voices: Women in Nineteenth-Century
English Music (1998).56 The connections between women, sexuality, gender and
music are becoming more frequently explored, as has been done in this book.
Since the early 1990s interdisciplinary methodologies have increasingly
influenced musicology. There has been a growing awareness that the traditional idea
of the arts as ‘sisters’ can be updated and utilized in explorations of, for example,
the influence of art forms upon one another or the influence of cultural change and
ideas upon those art forms. As discussed in Part III, Visual Culture, Richard Leppert
has published widely on the intertextuality between ‘high art’ and music and more
recently art critics like Suzanne Fagence Cooper are specializing in music and
its visual representation.57 Since the turn of the twenty-first century a number of

51 Moran, Interdisciplinarity, p. 15.

52 Ibid., pp. 14–15.
53 Derek B. Scott, The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room and
Parlour (Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1989).
54 Ellen Koskoff (ed.), Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective (London:
Greenwood Press, Inc., 1987).
55 Leslie Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (eds), Embodied Voices: Representing Female
Vocality in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
56 Derek Hyde, New-Found Voices: Women in Nineteenth-Century English Music, 3rd
edn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998).
57 Suzanne Fagence Cooper, ‘Aspiring to the Condition of Music: Painting in Britain
1860–1900’, in Jeremy Dibble and Bennett Zon (eds), Nineteenth-Century British Music
 Orientalism and its relation to music 11
interdisciplinary scholars, primarily women, have been considering depictions of
music in literature, for example The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction (2004) edited
by Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff,58 and the work of Phyllis Weliver.

Orientalism and musicology

As can be demonstrated from the preceding catalogue of influential works

above, it is becoming more generally acknowledged that cultural context is an
important aspect of musicological interpretation,59 thus in some ways musicology
is integrating more ethnomusicological elements. As David Gramit recognizes,
‘Among the areas of musicology that have been particularly vital in recent years
is the exploration of European composers’ representations of cultural “others”’;60
however much of this musicological research regards late nineteenth-century
European opera, and there is little analysis of orientalism on the British stage, a
situation that this book aims to redress.
Edward Said devoted a section of his 1993 book Culture and Imperialism to an
exploration of Giuseppe Verdi’s (1813–1901) Aïda (1871) in its cultural/orientalist
context;61 this led to heightened discussions within musicology about imperialism and
orientalism, and more directly to articles such as Paul Robinson’s ‘Is Aida an Orientalist
Opera?’ (1993).62 In Culture and Imperialism Said discusses his interpretation of Aïda
as representing an ‘Orientalized Egypt’ with ‘Oriental’ music created by Verdi;63 he
concludes that ‘As a highly specialized form of aesthetic memory, Aida embodies, as
it was intended to do, the authority of Europe’s version of Egypt at a moment in its
nineteenth-century history.’64 These operatic works represent Europeans’ perceptions
of the ‘Orient’, as opposed to any reality of those cultures. Said’s writing here is
certainly a large leap from his musings on Western art music that he had published
only two years earlier under the title Musical Elaborations (1991);65 despite his
assertion in that text that musical study ‘can be more, and not less, interesting if we
situate music as taking place, so to speak, in a social and cultural setting’,66 he seems
to treat music in the abstract, almost de-contextualizing it.

Studies (London: Ashgate, 2002), vol. 2, pp. 251–77.

58 Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff (eds), The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
59 Jeffrey Richards, Imperialism and Music: Britain 1876–1953 (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 8.
60 David Gramit, ‘Orientalism and the Lied: Schubert’s “Du liebst mich nicht”’,
19th-Century Music, 27/2 (2003): 97.
61 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993),
pp. 134–57.
62 Paul Robinson, ‘Is Aida an Orientalist Opera?’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 5/2 (July
1993): 133–40.
63 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 145.
64 Ibid., p. 151.
65 Edward W. Said, Musical Elaborations (New York: Columbia University Press,
1991).
66 Ibid., p. xvi.
12 Orientalism and Representations of Music
Said’s specific references to music and the ‘Orient’ in Culture and Imperialism
came at a time when musicologists were beginning to be more concerned with
orientalism; indeed it was in the early 1990s that Ralph P. Locke, one of the most
published musicologists on orientalism and music, began to focus on this area.
This focus has continued to the present day, and he is currently working on a set of
books on exoticism and orientalism for Cambridge University Press (of which some
chapters have previously been published in article format), entitled The Exotic in
Music: Reflections; Musical Exoticism from the Renaissance Court to Mozart and
The Middle East in Western Music.67
Not only has Locke written about particular ‘Oriental’ works, including Camille
Saint-Saëns’s (1835–1921) Samson et Dalila (1877),68 he addresses orientalism as a
phenomenon within musicology and suggests theoretical frameworks through and by
which it can be considered. In 1998 he sets out five ‘interrelated issues’ to contemplate
when regarding orientalist musicology: how much works (claim to) reflect the ‘real’
‘Orient’; how ‘Oriental’ fantasy interplays with this; how the ‘Orient’ is depicted
musically and extra-musically; if ‘Oriental’ musical devices are there, how they relate
to other musical exoticisms (for example Native American or ‘Gypsy’ tropes); and
do these musical devices actually relate to any lived, ‘real’ ‘Oriental’ music?69 In The
Musical Stage aspects of this framework are utilized, however the majority of the
case studies in this discussion are not overtly musically ‘Oriental’-influenced.
Alongside this framework Locke makes many other suggestions about orientalism
and musicology that are of pertinence to this book. As much as musical works
may claim to represent the ‘Orient’ they are also fictions, intended to be enjoyable
entertainments or aesthetic diversions,70 something particularly true of comic stage
works. Locke asserts that this ‘very fictiveness of artworks serves to disguise or make
palatable some demonstrably prejudicial portrayals of other peoples and places’.71
Positive portrayals of the Other ‘can veil from sight the complexities of that other
culture as fully as do frankly negative stereotypes’,72 something that is considered
in Chapter 3: ‘An angel/demon dualism’. Indeed Locke believes that the romance of
‘Oriental’ operatic works could serve to mask underlying political struggles,73 and
just like Said and Sardar, contends that there is more to learn about Europe than the
‘Orient’ in these works, particularly in patently allegorical works set in the ‘Orient’,
but addressing European concerns.74 With all ‘Oriental’ works one must remember
that the work is European – in many ways it is irrelevant to the ‘Orient’, as are

67 Private Communication, 1 February 2007, from Ralph P. Locke to the author.

68 Ralph P. Locke, ‘Cutthroats and Casbah Dancers, Muezzins and Timeless Sands:
Musical Images of the Middle East’, 19th-Century Music, 22/1 (Summer 1998): 42.
69 Ralph P. Locke, ‘Cutthroats and Casbah Dancers, Muezzins and Timeless Sands:
Musical Images of the Middle East’, in Jonathon Bellman (ed.), The Exotic in Western Music
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), p. 105.
70 Ibid., p. 105.
71 Locke, ‘Cutthroats and Casbah Dancers’, 19th-Century Music: 22.
72 Locke, ‘Cutthroats and Casbah Dancers’, in The Exotic in Western Music, p. 108.
73 Locke, ‘Cutthroats and Casbah Dancers’, 19th-Century Music: 37.
74 Ralph P. Locke, ‘Reflections on Orientalism in Opera and Musical Theater’, Opera
Quarterly, 10/1 (1993–94): 61.
 Orientalism and its relation to music 13
those cultures to it – but despite this it can have the power to influence and change
Europeans’ perceptions and behaviours towards its Others.75
More recently Matthew Head has also addressed orientalism and musicology
from a theoretical viewpoint in his article ‘Musicology on Safari: Orientalism and
the Spectre of Postcolonial Theory’ (2003). He criticizes the ‘safari mentality’ of
many musicologists who name and classify the Other, merely observing orientalism
instead of evaluating it.76 He describes how musicologists ‘almost always describe
orientalist figures as clearly, even self-evidently, identifiable and recognisable. This
is all the more remarkable because writers do not necessarily agree with each other
on whether a work contains an orientalist figure.’77 He wishes to dissuade academics
from attempting to create a teleological, developmental view of orientalism, as
for Head orientalist representations fall out of fashion, rather than evolve, usually
because of changes in the European cultures that create them.78 The orientalist
romances of Rider Haggard could be seen as a case in point: in the 1890s they were
at the height of fashion and innovation in portrayals of the Other, however by the late
1910s Haggard’s continuing creation of romances involving the same model of the
Other had become outdated, and works like Hull’s The Sheik of 1919, which inverts
and manipulates many of Haggard’s orientalist images, were instead the mode. Head
quotes Haggard’s ‘insight’ about military might that ‘the Other can “serve as a template
for self-construction, being [presented as] a model of the martial power to which
the colonist aspired”’.79 This insight can be developed; not only can the Other be
inspirational (and envy-inducing) in certain cultural aspects, so providing a ‘template’
for European observers, but the Other can also act as a foil for ‘self-construction’, a
marker against which Europeans may consider what they are (supposedly) not.
This book is being produced at a time when orientalism is clearly grounded
in musicological theory, and a juncture at which there is heightened awareness of
orientalism owing to the recent death of Edward Said, who nonetheless remains a
seminal influence. This book is adding to the corpus of interdisciplinary work that
is being built around musicology,80 embracing orientalist theories, and specifically
exploring ideas of the Other, gender and sexuality and their interplay in different
popular art-forms.

75 Ralph P. Locke, ‘Reflections on Orientalism in Opera and Musical Theater’, Opera

Quarterly, 10/1 (1993–94): 61.
76 M. Head, ‘Critical Forum: Musicology on Safari: Orientalism and the Spectre of
Postcolonial Theory’, Music Analysis, 22/1–2 (2003): 223.
77 Ibid., 223–4.
78 Ibid., 226.
79 H. Rider Haggard quoted in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial
Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: a Reader (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993),
p. 17. Cited in Head, ‘Critical Forum’: 214.
80 One forthcoming example being Bennett Zon’s Representing Non-Western Music
in Nineteenth Century Britain (Rochester: Rochester University Press, forthcoming) which
purports to discuss representations of music in relation to ‘race’ and contemporaneous
‘scientific’ theories.
14 Orientalism and Representations of Music
British orientalism and the long nineteenth-century arts

Each of the three sections of this book opens with a short introduction and overview
with specific reference to the artistic mediums discussed in that section. The
discussions of the musical stage and ‘high art’ incorporate works ranging from the
start of the 1810s through into the 1910s, whereas the literature and other visual
sections focus more on the second half of the long nineteenth century. Although the
primary focus has been on these later decades when ideas about the Other and ‘Orient’
were increasingly stereotyped and negative, it was pertinent to retain investigations
of the early nineteenth-century musical stage and ‘high art’ to illustrate the ways in
which orientalist-musical representations of the late nineteenth century continued and
changed earlier ideas and did not suddenly emerge fully-fledged. The sections on
earlier nineteenth-century opera and art are therefore important to contextualize the
later nineteenth-century thoughts and depictions discussed more widely in this book.
It is apparent that The Musical Stage covers larger numbers of artists (both
composers and librettists) and works than the other sections, and this is because
these works offer a different type of representation of the Other and ‘Orient’; unlike
the visual and fictional works which use music to describe Others, in opera libretti
Others are described in text that is set to music. The Works of Fiction and Visual
Culture sections utilize fewer primary examples because the frequent metaphorical
nature of the musical references means that the sources are often richer and more
complex in their presentations of the musical Other, whereas the opera libretti tend to
offer more shallow and less nuanced stereotyping, thus profiting more from analysis
in conjunction with many other contemporary works. Owing to the relative size of a
novel or romance in relation to a visual artwork or opera text, it made sense to focus
on a close study in the Works of Fiction section, and it was the particular richness and
interesting applications of othered musical representation in the works of H. Rider
Haggard that led to my focus on him in these chapters on fiction (and indeed also in
the illustration chapter in Visual Culture), alongside his own influence and success as
a literary and colonial figure at the close of the long nineteenth century.

The Musical Stage

This opening section of the book considers a selection of opera libretti as examples of
how the ‘Orient’ and more general Others were depicted on the stage in nineteenth-
century Britain, with analyses of both musical numbers and spoken dialogue. The
Musical Stage addresses case studies of opera libretti spanning over one hundred
years; the lengthier timeframe of this section creates the opportunity to illustrate how
the musical representations of the late nineteenth century continued and changed
from the earlier ideas. Libretto theory exploring the relationships between text and
music in opera is pertinent to this part of this book, and is a field that is beginning
to gain more interest. In his 1977 book Romantic Opera and Literary Form, Peter
Conrad makes the provocative statements that ‘Words and music are enemies’ and that
 Orientalism and its relation to music 15
‘Opera is the continuation of their warfare’.81 When interpreting opera it is delicate
to reach a ‘truce’ in the ‘warfare’ between words and music; one cannot ignore either
music or text completely, but an analysis almost inevitably places weightier focus on
one of these areas. In attempting to perform this balancing act, many writers being
musicologists will ultimately stress the precedence of music. Paul Robinson did so
when he wrote that ‘Words and stories, however, are only the beginning’ and that the
‘principal thing’ distinguishing opera from drama is music.82 Robinson believes that
‘The master question for any interpreter of opera must not be “What does the text
say, but How is the text realised, or at least addressed, in the music?”’83 Indeed, when
attempting to interpret an opera, it is the music that distinguishes it from ‘straight’
drama; however this section is not attempting to interpret opera as such, but to see if
and how representations in opera express commonly held nineteenth-century ideas
and opinions. Accordingly, this book is not attempting to read the ‘meaning’ of opera
(whatever that may be) through libretti, but attempts to utilize libretti as cultural
documents and indicators of widely held acceptable thought.
In Indian Music and the West (1997) Gerry Farrell expresses his belief that a
‘standardised musical orientalism’ was created in the nineteenth century,84 which the
repertoire of stereotypical ‘native’ characterizations in the non-European musical
stage works of Sir Henry Bishop helped to create and uphold at the start of the
century. To an extent, it is true that some of the stereotypes at times are ‘racially’
interchangeable, supporting Edward Said’s contention that Others are frequently
considered in ‘abstract generalities’;85 the notion that the majority of ‘natives’ would
be corrupt, violent and idolatrous is applicable whether in Africa, South America, India
or the ‘Middle East’. Other ideas however are more culturally and geographically
specific – a fascination with mysticism and hidden sexuality is reserved for the
‘Orient’ and does not transfer elsewhere, and the stereotype of the ‘noble savage’
whether female or male (with its accompanying associations of ‘quaintness’) is not
applied to Islamic cultures, but is employed to different degrees to representations of
South Americans, black Africans and Indians. A violent South American idolatry acts
as the antithesis of the ‘noble savage’ stereotype – incarnating the ‘savage’ proper; in
the depictions of true ‘savages’ in Bishop’s works there is no trace of the quaintness
associated with pidgin-English comedy characters, or the guileless self-sacrificing
women, but mere violent savagery.
In Bishop’s South American musical stage works there is a clear line drawn
between those characters considered ‘noble’ and ‘quaint’ and those merely seen as
savage, and that line is the ‘native’ attitude to the Europeans. Those who help the

81 Peter Conrad, Romantic Opera and Literary Form (London: University of California
Press, 1977), p. 178.
82 Paul Robinson, Opera and Ideas: From Mozart to Strauss (New York: Cornell
University Press, 1985), p. 2.
83 Paul Robinson, ‘A Deconstructive Postscript: Reading Libretti and Misreading
Opera’, in Arthur Groos and Roger Parker (eds), Reading Opera (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1988), pp. 341–2.
84 Gerry Farrell, Indian Music and the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997),
pp. 78–9.
85 Said, Orientalism, pp. 154–5.
16 Orientalism and Representations of Music
Europeans are viewed as quaintly noble, yet ‘racially’ inferior, however those who do
not align themselves with the white characters are depicted as ‘racially’ ‘degenerate’
and dangerous. This binarism between dangerous and ‘noble’ ‘savages’ aligns with
the assertion that Others were depicted as ‘degenerate’ to validate conquest and
interference, but redeemable enough to excuse Europe’s continuing interference.86
By the early nineteenth century however, non-Europeans began to be portrayed in
a downward spiral of negativity – as foolish (a darker aspect of quaintness) and
‘degenerate’, with the ‘noble savage’ myth dying out by the mid-century. The opera
libretti set by Bishop serve as examples of these greater trends in British thought, on
the cusp of the quaint ‘noble savage’s’ demise.
By the mid-nineteenth century and the composition of the musical dramatic
works used here as case studies, representations had altered markedly from those of
Bishop’s day. The overall tone of these works is much more comical, and complex
subjects are treated with less gravity. The representations of ‘Oriental’ women have
diversified, but also strengthened in negativity in some aspects; dichotomies are
established with the ‘Oriental’ female as proud predatory, sexual being or conversely
as duty-bound, languishing, object of voyeuristic sexual fantasy. There is furthermore
a more overt focus on the harem as a concept and as a physical space. Miscegenation
(inter-‘racial’ sexual relationships) continues to be practised, and now with Islamic
women, but still not with Africans who are generally represented in a much more
derogatory manner. Violence has diminished, but duplicity and corruption are
becoming central aspects of the ‘Oriental’ character, and the representations of religion
have become more comical and derogatory and are no longer mystical (in alignment
with the death of the ‘noble savage’ ideal). One explanation for the transformation
of representations from Bishop’s day may be that as Britain increased its imperial
power into the middle decades of the nineteenth century (pre-1857) ‘natives’ seemed
to pose less of a threat to British stability, so comical representations of Britain’s
Others became more suitable than before. This is the case with Lord Bateman (1850)
and The Cadi (1851) which were both first performed before the upheaval caused by
the Indian Mutiny (1857–1858), rocking the security of Empire. On the other hand
L’Africaine, or, The Belle of Madagascar was performed in 1860 after the rebellion,
so perhaps Arbuthnot’s highly negative black characters, and the resurgence of the
idea of Others practising human sacrifice, can be attributed to the fear and instability
caused by the Mutiny.
The representations of slavery are understandably fewer in these mid-century
dramas than in Bishop’s day, with the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act having
occurred nearly half a century earlier on 25 March 1807, and the Slavery Abolition
Act being enforced from 1834, forbidding the possession of slaves within the British
Empire and by British subjects. However the depictions of slavery and black peoples
that do occur in these works are far more racist and negative than those of thirty years
earlier. Birotteau describes the Cadi’s slaves as ‘These black animals of yours’,87 and

86 MacKenzie, Orientalism, p. 12.

87 [Thomas Marie François Sauvage], The Cadi: or, Amours among Moors. A Comic
Opera, in Two Acts. The Music by Ambroise Thomas. As Presented, for the First Time, at
The Theatre Royal Haymarket, On Wednesday, June 18th, 1851, Under the Management of
 Orientalism and its relation to music 17
Arbuthnot’s Nelusko sings that ‘They call me a darned nigger, ’cos my skin it is not
white.’88 Use of the term ‘nigger’ does not occur in any of Bishop’s works and here
illustrates the newer fear, dislike and contempt for black peoples that were arising in
Britain by the mid-nineteenth century. Selika, herself African, jibes ‘Nelusko, dear,
you’re just like a gorilla: / I mean as active’;89 highlighting the animalistic nature of the
African male and then retracting the line to make it seem that the simile was intended
to be one of action and not appearance or disposition would have been inconceivable
in the worlds of Bishop’s musical stage works. Indeed, to reveal the difference in tone,
one merely has to view the stage directions for the opening scenes of Arbuthnot’s
comedy: Vasco enters ‘carrying with difficulty a large bottle labelled “Cape Sherry”
in one hand, and dragging NELUSKO and SELIKA by a rope round their necks with
the other.’90 This imagery of human degradation coupled with a comically large bottle
of ‘Cape’ Sherry (to highlight where Vasco has been travelling) is intended to amuse;
clearly gone are the days of Bishop’s ‘noble savages.’
By the close of the century, on the surface Britain appeared to have convinced
itself of the stability of Empire, but the exploration of operatic representations here
undertaken digs into the cracks in this veneer of safety, and explores underlying fears
and questions of ‘Orient’ and Empire. Despite the apparent confidence in Empire
and Britain at the close of the nineteenth century, the image was brittle, hence the
increased mockery and negative stereotyping of non-Europeans and the amplified
‘horror’ at miscegenation in these case studies. Moving into the twentieth century
the earlier depictions continue to solidify, sometimes to the point of caricature, as
the stability of Empire wavered and began to fail. Representations of ‘Orientals’ and
other non-Europeans diversified. The old Victorian dichotomy of the ‘angel in the
home’ versus the ‘worldly whore’ can be seen to be influencing the representations
of non-European women in these works; a polarization is established between the
pliable, willing, simple and honourable maid (a ‘poor relative’ of the earlier ‘noble
savage’ figure) and the manipulative, mercurial, sexually-aware temptress. Relating
to this, the contradictory ideas concerning miscegenation depend upon which
‘category’ the ‘native’ fits into – with honour or without.
There is a new focus on the physicality of the women, and the idea of undressing
replaces that of unveiling – indeed there is generally a move away from ideas of the
veil and harem. Dance has become a more central indicator of lax sexuality, again
presenting a more physical focus. The non-European males are similarly polarized,
but between the noble warrior of places like Japan and Zululand and the caricatures
of the imbecilic Chinese or violent Arabs, thus the images of the men have become
much more culturally specific, in a way not dissimilar to those of a century earlier
in Bishop’s works. These contradictions in representations seem to have arisen

Benjamin Webster, Esq. Copyright Edition. [Libretto] [Anonymous translation] (London:

S.G. Fairbrother, 1851), p. 31.
88 Captain Arbuthnot, Lacy’s Acting Edition. L’Africaine, or, The Belle of Madagascar.
A Burlesque, in One Act. (Being the first Extravaganza on the subject printed.) [Libretto]
(London: Thomas Hails Lacy, n.d. [1860]), p. 8.
89 Ibid., p. 24.
90 Ibid., p. 5.
18 Orientalism and Representations of Music
from greater knowledge of other cultures through increased ease of travel and
wider publication, so depictions of ‘natives’ now tend to be geographically specific
interpretations of older themes, such as female sexuality, male violence and honour.
Sexuality is a major component of the changing portrayals of non-Europeans in
these musical stage works, as are other themes such as ‘nobility’, violence, religious
practice and indolence – all of which characteristics were attributed to ‘racial’
difference. It was possible for some ‘natives’ to share some British characteristics,
such as ‘honour’ or ‘duty’, but ‘natives’ could not be ascribed a large number of
these, as this would make them socially equal.91 As Kenan Malik highlights, ‘In the
end it mattered little that the scientific basis of racial divisions was tenuous at best.
Race was a social category, not a scientific one. What was important … was not that
races existed, but that society should be organized as if they did.’92 Representations of
non-Europeans like those in these musical works are one such organizational device,
often with ‘constructed ignorance’ influencing the ‘representation of races on stage’,
thus ‘compound[ing] the stereotyping’.93 In view of this, it is pertinent to return to
Peter Kivy’s statement that ‘what is represented’ in musical drama ‘is not music but
the world as the librettist, the composer and (at least some of) their contemporaries
construe it’;94 an assertion supported by the analyses of these libretti case studies.
Prejudices and stereotypes changed throughout the long nineteenth century, and
these alterations are mirrored in the works catering to the demands of the day, such
as the ‘Oriental’ stage-works of Bishop, Solomon, Talbot and others. Although these
stereotypes were also influenced by historical events, like in most popular art-forms,
facts were transformed by the popular imagination. The orientalizing of Britain’s
Others in these works was largely based upon a lack of understanding of foreign
cultures and the song-writers’ romanticization of the changing intellectual ideas of
the long nineteenth century.

Works of Fiction

This section of the book considers the highly popular romances of H. Rider Haggard,
as well as contextualizing literary works, to investigate the various ways in which
musical ‘Orients’ were represented in nineteenth-century British popular fiction.
The focus on Haggard’s works in this section allows an opportunity for an in-depth
analysis of this one writer on ‘Orient’ and Other at the end of the long nineteenth
century. Haggard was an incredibly successful writer of the Other for a broad
commercial readership, thus his works are pertinent as a case study of the ways
in which Others could be (and were) represented for a nineteenth-century British

91 Laurence Kitzan, Victorian Writers and the Image of Empire: The Rose-Colored
Vision (London: Greenwood Press, 2001), p. 8.
92 Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society
(London: Macmillan Press, 1996), p. 121.
93 Brian Singleton, Oscar Asche, Orientalism, and British Musical Comedy. Contributions
in Drama and Theatre Studies, Number 106, Lives of the Theatre (London: Praeger, 2004),
p. 67.
94 Peter Kivy, Osmin’s Rage: Philosophical Reflections on Opera, Drama, and Text
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 184.
 Orientalism and its relation to music 19
audience. Haggard and his contemporaries utilized music to other women and men
in very different ways, hence the section’s separation into gendered chapters.
When Haggard’s Other women display qualities most feared (yet sometimes
desired) by British society they are at their most musical; an essential component
of Haggard’s characterization for his dangerous, sexual women is musicality, and
perhaps Haggard aligns these two concepts because it is hard to rationalize either
clearly. He associates their musicality with allure, sensuality, danger, power-
lust and finally violence. Although his femmes fatales are visually appealing and
welcome British men’s ‘gaze’, with their music they subvert power relations and
gain control.
Conversely, Haggard’s musical images concerning Other men avoid sexualization;
instead his music highlights their Other qualities, whether good (including nobility
and loyalty) or bad (for example violence or ‘primitive’ worship). Again in contrast
to Haggard’s musical individualization of Other women, he primarily uses masculine
music to reinforce the idea of a faceless male Other, as part of a group – the Other as
described in Said’s ‘large collective terms’.95
The initial contextualizing material in this section places Haggard’s works within
his contemporary fiction and indicates that for these British fiction-writers music
is often closely related to the representation of the Other, as it is frequently used
metaphorically to represent innate Other characteristics or as behaviour displaying
people’s otherness. Music is often not only an indication of otherness, but can be an
active force in these works, where it is frequently integral to the othered physicality
of non-European characters.
The final chapter in this section acts as a coda, and explores issues of gender
and music in E.M. Hull’s The Sheik. Haggard and many of his contemporaries use
musicality to sexualize their ‘Oriental’ women, however Hull (the nom de plume of
Edith Maude Winstanley) utilizes similar musical ideas to sensualize her male Sheik.
This chapter explores the ways in which Hull subverts the (by then) established
markers of ‘Oriental’ musical sensuality. Music has the ability to express and (as
these analyses of Hull and Wilde’s works indicate) to transgress ideas of gender and
sexuality, making it a valuable device for the nineteenth-century writers here studied.
Music, like elements of sexuality and otherness, is difficult to capture satisfactorily
through language, which is perhaps one reason why Haggard and his contemporaries
so frequently link these concepts.

Visual Culture

This final section examines case studies of Other musics as represented in different
visual forms, namely ‘high art’, photography and illustration, and highlights the ways
in which these disciplines frequently overlap in their ideologies and representations
of musical ‘Orients’ and Others. Indeed, one of the most prominent aspects of these
case-study explorations of visual culture in long nineteenth-century Britain is the
inter-relatedness of the different visual disciplines. The imagery established as
acceptable in the ‘high arts’, most particularly painting, was highly influential on the

95 Said, Orientalism, pp. 154–5.

20 Orientalism and Representations of Music
work of photographers and also on the illustrators of popular fiction (both popular
in its mass distribution and acceptance, and in being intended for a wide general
public). None of these disciplines is independent, but they all take elements from and
are influenced by the representations established in one another, and indeed those
prevalent in contemporary literary and stage works.
The images considered in this section seem to fall into four broad groupings
(although, as with any taxonomy there is always some overlapping). Some of these
artists depicted an ‘Orient’ that was entirely of their own imagining, having never
visited the societies that they are representing; it is important to distinguish between
artists who had visited the ‘Orient’ and those who ‘simply exploited a fashionable
style’.96 The ‘Oriental’ paintings of artists like Richard Parkes Bonington and
photographs by Roger Fenton are pure fantasy, as the artists had never been to the
‘Orient’, thus these works are based purely on the absorption of other people’s
descriptions and the prevailing stereotypes and prejudices of the day. These works
are the vaguest in their designation of subject, with non-specific titles designating
Others as conceptual generalities, like Fenton’s The Pasha and Bayadère and
Bonington’s Odalisque in Yellow. They appear highly staged with only ‘Oriental’
props to designate place, as opposed to any real detail or knowledge.
Continuing the theme of imagination, the second category of works represents
a past ‘Orient’, normally one that is more glorious than the present. Many of the
illustrations for Haggard’s works (themselves set in ‘history’) can be considered
in this way, as can ‘high’ artworks like Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Antony and
Cleopatra. Owing to the combination of removed place and time these works can be
as fantastical as the artist desires, although all of the works here studied that fall into
this category are bounded by external narrative – either Haggard’s texts, Biblical
story or ‘historical’ myth.
The third group contains artists who visited the ‘Orient’, but who chose to focus
on the places and peoples prohibited to them, instead of what they had actually seen.
The many harem scenes explored in Chapter 10 fall into this category, as indeed do
Felice Beato’s geisha photographs; they emphasize the British desire to penetrate the
‘Oriental’ veil. Finally there are those who tried to portray the ‘real’ ‘Orient’ as they
saw it, including the photographer Frances Frith and the artists Frank Dillon and Sir
John Lavery.
In my search for visual materials I contacted many art institutions,97 but it was
difficult to find many non-‘factual’ photographs of non-European musicians, hence
this book’s slightly shorter section on photography. I had also originally wished to

96 Philippe Jullian, The Orientalists: European Painters of Eastern Scenes (Oxford:

Phaidon, 1977), p. 30.
97 Including the Royal Geographical Society Picture Library, the Royal Academy of
Music, The Bill Douglas Centre, the City of Westminster Archives Centre, the Templeman
Library, Bethlem Royal Hospital and The British Film Institute; I also visited The British
Empire and Commonwealth Museum, The Victoria and Albert Museum, The National Gallery,
The Louvre and the Tate Britain. Although I corresponded with a variety of the curatorial staff
of The National Trust, they held nothing in their collections that I could use for this study.
 Orientalism and its relation to music 21
devote a chapter to the depiction of non-European musicians in silent film, however
sources were scarce and difficult to view so I had to shelve this line of enquiry.
Each of the artworks discussed in this book is an individual response to Britain’s
Others, but although the ‘Orient’ inspired artists in different ways and in varied
mediums, many of the British Victorian stereotypes of ‘Orient’, including a ‘noble’
historical past, present-day negative religious ritual and (particularly) heightened
female sexuality, are evident in these visual representations. This book’s interpretation
of this sample of images heightens the viewers’ awareness of the cultural–orientalist
context in which they were created, revealing not only how music was often
considered a valuable tool in the depiction of Others, but also the various ways in
which the ‘Orient’ entered the artistic imagination during the long nineteenth century
in Britain.

Concluding remarks

Certain representations of the musical ‘Orient’ and Other suffuse these case studies,
and move between the different artworks, artists and art-forms, despite the many
nuances in staging. This book explores the differences between these specific
depictions, but also aims to determine which elements of these representations are
more stable and long-lasting, and if, how and why they change with time.
In any study of this nature the author must decide upon the depth of analysis;
it was not my desire to attempt to cover large amounts of material in only shallow
detail, so whilst endeavouring to retain a broad spectrum of examples, the focus
is more particularly on certain artists and artworks. In a realm as subjective as the
portrayal of Others and ‘Orient’ there will inevitably be (often much) difference
between individual artists’ ideas, thus in focusing on specific people, and being able
to contextualize them biographically and historically, I feel that the resultant detailed
and historically-grounded analyses have justified this decision.
This book’s interdisciplinary framework allows the consideration of a broad
cross-section of examples from the popular arts and thus an insight into some of
the ways in which widespread prejudices of the Other and ‘Orient’ were played out
in different art-forms. Whilst interdisciplinary, this book attempts to be balanced in
its theoretical understanding of the different arts, thus a large body of theoretical
writings has been consulted and engaged with; through these means, and despite the
focus on representations of music, it attempts to avoid biasing this study too much
towards the single discipline of music. The choice of primary material to analyse and
for contextualization in this exploration has been as broad-ranging as was practical,
and includes opera libretti, play texts, songs, travel writings, romances, novellas,
short stories, poems, children’s fiction, diaries, ‘high art’, photographs, films, book
illustrations, periodical illustrations, newspapers, magazines and journals. Through
the analyses of this set of case studies taken from the long nineteenth-century British
popular arts, this book explores issues of the Other, orientalism, gender and sexuality
with regards to representations of non-European music and musicians.