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‘SALAMELICA’: NEW THOUGHTS ON VOLPINO AND HIS ARIA IN ACT III OF LO SPEZIALE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2020
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Recently, as I was doing research for a project on eighteenth-century dances, I came across the following entry in Charles Compan's Dictionnaire de danse (1787):
Salamalec. Salut à la Turque, qui signifie, Dieu vous garde. On s'est servi longtems à Paris de cette expression, pour saluer une personne en buvant à sa santé. Salamalec, ou, comme prononcent les Turcs, Selamalec, n'est pas seulement une salutation des Turcs, mais encore des Arabes, & même de tous les peuples Mahométans.
Salamalec. Turkish greeting meaning ‘May God keep you’. This expression has long been used in Paris as a toast when drinking to someone's health. ‘Salamalec’, or as the Turks pronounce it, ‘Selamalec’, is not only a greeting of the Turks, but of Arabs and even of all Muslim peoples.
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References
1 Compan, Charles, Dictionnaire de danse: contenant l'histoire, les règles & les principes de cet art, avec des réflexions critiques, & des anecdotes curieuses concernant la dance ancienne et moderne; le tout tiré des meilleurs auteurs qui ont écrit sur cet art (Paris: Cailleau, 1787), 337–338Google Scholar. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own, and I have retained original orthography in quoted material. Compan's assertion that ‘salamalec’ was a toast suggests that this expression may have been used mockingly, since Muslims are generally forbidden to drink alcohol.
2 Head, Matthew, ‘Haydn's Exoticisms: “Difference” and the Enlightenment’, in The Cambridge Companion to Haydn, ed. Clark, Caryl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 77Google Scholar; Clark, Caryl, Haydn's Jews: Representation and Reception on the Operatic Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 135Google Scholar; Clark, Caryl, ‘Haydn's Judaizing of the Apothecary’, Studia Musicologica 51/1–2 (2009), 56Google Scholar; Clark, Caryl, ‘Encountering “Others” in Haydn's Lo speziale (1768)’, in Ottoman Empire and European Theatre, volume 2: The Time of Joseph Haydn: From Sultan Mahmud I to Mahmud II (r. 1730–1839), ed. Hüttler, Michael and Weidinger, Hans Ernst (Vienna: Hollitzer, 2014), 293Google Scholar; Clark, Caryl, ‘Joseph Haydn's Judaizing of the Apothecary – Take 2’, in Opera in a Multicultural World: Coloniality, Culture, Performance, ed. Ingraham, Mary I., So, Joseph K. and Moodley, Roy (New York: Routledge, 2016), 115Google Scholar; and Wolff, Larry, The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016)Google Scholar, 132 and 131 respectively.
3 Based on the number of librettos printed for the premiere of Lo speziale, guests numbered approximately three hundred, in addition to Prince and Princess Esterházy and Archduchess Marie Christine (a daughter of Empress Maria Theresa) and her husband Duke Albert von Sachsen-Teschen, who lived a short distance from Eszterháza at Halbturn Castle. See Rebecca Lee Green, Power and Patriarchy in Haydn's Goldoni Operas (PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 1995), especially 53 and 135.
4 Goldoni wrote the libretto in 1752 for Bologna's carnival, and it was set by Domenico Fischietti and Vincenzo Pallavicini in 1754 and performed at Venice's carnival in 1755. Goldoni's original version as well as Fischietti and Pallavicini's setting of it are more complicated than the version set by Haydn – they include more characters (both parti serie and parti buffe) as well as a lengthier and more intricate plot. Haydn's version was probably prepared by Carl Friberth, who also premiered the role of Sempronio. For further discussion of the genesis of the libretto and Haydn's setting of it see Peter Branscombe, ‘Speziale, Lo (ii)’, in Grove Music Online www.oxfordmusiconline.com (17 January 2019); Robbins Landon, H. C., ‘Joseph Haydn: Lo speziale, Foreword to the Facsimile of the Printed Libretto’, Haydn Yearbook 21 (1997), 1Google Scholar; Haydn, Joseph, Lo speziale, ed. Wirth, Helmut(Munich: G. Henle, 1959), vii–viiiGoogle Scholar; and Green, Power and Patriarchy, 130–132.
5 As given in the libretto printed for the premiere of Lo speziale at Eszterháza and reproduced in facsimile in Landon, ‘Joseph Haydn: Lo speziale’, 1. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations of the libretto of Lo speziale are from this source. For details about the printed libretto as well as Haydn's autograph score – from which large portions of Act 3 are missing – see Green, Power and Patriarchy, 103–104.
6 See Thomas, Günter and Feder, Georg, ‘Dokumente zur Ausstattung von Lo speziale, L'infedeltà delusa, La fedeltà premiata, Armida und anderen Opern Haydns’, Haydn-Studien 6/2 (1988), 102Google Scholar: ‘Zwey rothe Türcken Kleyder samt Kappen, und Bünden’, according to a 1775 inventory of costumes and props for the Eszterháza stage. Thomas and Feder explain that ‘Bünden’ are ‘Leibbinden’. When Volpino realizes that Sempronio has married Grilletta to Mengone, he exclaims: ‘E tai baffi, e vestiti mando al Diavolo’.
7 Head, Matthew, Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart's Turkish Music (London: Royal Musical Association, 2000), 67–70Google Scholar; Head, ‘Haydn's Exoticisms’, 78–79; and Szabolcsi, Bence, ‘Exoticisms in Mozart’, Music and Letters 37/4 (1956), 329–330CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Clark, ‘Haydn's Judaizing of the Apothecary’, 59. See also Clark, ‘Encountering “Others”’, 296; and Clark, ‘Joseph Haydn's Judaizing of the Apothecary’, 115–116. Some of Clark's interpretations have been disputed – see, for instance, Jeanne Swack's and Bruce Alan Brown's reviews of her book Haydn's Jews (Musica Judaica Online Reviews (26 July 2010) https://mjoreviews.org/tag/jeanne-swack/ (7 August 2019) and Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 34/4 (2011), 565–566 respectively).
9 Hunter, Mary, ‘The Alla Turca Style in the Late Eighteenth Century: Race and Gender in the Symphony and the Seraglio’, in The Exotic in Western Music, ed. Bellman, Jonathan (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 53Google Scholar.
10 Based on the 1775 inventory of costumes and props for the Eszterháza stage, Volpino – when not impersonating a notary or a Turkish envoy – wore a light blue three-piece suit embellished with gold and silver, suggesting status and wealth. See Thomas and Feder, ‘Dokumente zur Ausstattung von Lo speziale’, 90 and 102.
11 This list is based in part on Wolff, The Singing Turk, 129.
12 See Carlo Goldoni: Drammi per musica (Università di Padova) http://www.carlogoldoni.it/public/lessico/lessico/lettera/s (7 August 2019).
13 The tone of source 5 is one of mockery and of sexual double entendre.
14 The inclusion of ‘salamalec’ (and its definition as a ‘salutation des Turcs, des Arabes, & de tous les Mahométans prise des Syriaques’) in the revised 1727 edition of Antoine Furetière's Dictionnaire universel is also suggestive of this trend; no entry for this term appears in the original 1690 edition. The term is also absent from another late seventeenth-century reference work, Richelet's, P[ierre]Dictionnaire françois: contenant les mots et les choses, plusieurs nouvelles remarques sur la langue françoise (Geneva: Widerhold, 1680)Google Scholar.
15 Rey, Alain, general ed., Dictionnaire historique de la langue française (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1994)Google Scholar, volume 2, 1865. I have found an earlier French musical source in which the term ‘salamalec’ appears in a multilingual nonsense song: ‘L'air du juif errant’ (incipit: ‘Salamalec Ô Rocoha’) from Etienne Moulinié’s (c1600–after 1669) burlesque ballet de cour Le mariage de Pierre de Provence avec la belle Maguelonne, which was performed in Tours in 1638. As Vincent Dumestre has noted, this air mixes so many languages – Latin, English, French, German, Arabic, Italian and Flemish – that it is incomprehensible, a parody of the mythical Wandering Jew in search of an identity and a homeland. See Vincent Dumestre, liner notes to Estienne Moulinié, L'humaine comédie, performed by Le Poème Harmonique, directed by Vincent Dumestre (Alpha 005, 1999).
16 Battaglia, Salvatore, Grande dizionario della lingua italiana (Turin: Unione Tipografico, 1994)Google Scholar, volume 17, 375, column 2.
17 For more on the history of Franco-Ottoman relations see Wolff, The Singing Turk, chapter 2.
18 See Goodman, Jessica, Goldoni in Paris: la gloire et le malentendu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 142, 148–149, 152, and 163.
19 Volpino's aria in Act 2 Scene 1, in which he tells Sempronio ‘a charming story [that] has come from France’, possibly further suggests his familiarity with that country, both through its text and its music, which evokes a minuet topic. Volpino's explicit allusion to France as the source of his story is particularly conspicuous as it is the only Western European nation – other than Italy, where the action takes place – to figure in a libretto replete with references to foreign lands: the Molucca Islands, China, Cephalonia, Persia, Babylon, Turkey, India, Tartary and Mongolia.
20 Carlo Goldoni: Drammi per musica (7 August 2019). ‘Incogniti’ could also be translated as ‘those who hide themselves’.
21 [Palomba, Giuseppe,] L'albergatrice vivace, a Comic Opera, as Performed at the King's Theatre, in the Haymarket, under the Direction of Signor Anfossi (London: H. Reynell, 1783)Google Scholar, 9.
22 Rice, John A., Antonio Salieri and Viennese Opera (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 71Google Scholar.
23 The ungrammatical Italian of Volpino's aria may bring to mind Lingua Franca, a pidgin trade language used by various linguistic communities around the Mediterranean from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century. As the late linguist Alan D. Corré noted in his extremely valuable ‘cybergraph’ on Lingua Franca, many opera librettos feature passages in Lingua Franca, including a particularly extensive one in Act 3 of Goldoni's comedy L'impresario delle Smirne, which Corré reproduces in its entirety. A comparison of this text to Volpino's aria quickly reveals that the latter is not in Lingua Franca – it lacks, notably, the easily recognizable verbs ending in -r, which Corré discusses in the introduction to his website. Furthermore, none of the words of Volpino's aria – including ‘salamelica’ or a construction similar to it – appears in Corré’s glossary of Lingua Franca. See https://minds.wisconsin.edu/bitstream/item/3920/go.html (17 January 2019). See also the discussion and further examples of Lingua Franca in seventeenth-century French librettos in Betzwieser, Thomas, Exotismus und ‘Türkenoper’ in der französischen Musik des Ancien Régime: Studien zu einem ästhetischen Phänomen (Laaber: Laaber, 1993), 121–140.Google Scholar
24 Head, ‘Haydn's Exoticisms’, 79, notes that here ‘exoticism is a mechanism that highlights a character flaw’: Sempronio's greed.
25 See Brown, review of Haydn's Jews, 565. For more on nouvellistes in eighteenth-century France see Darnton, Robert, The Devil in the Holy Water or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010)Google Scholar.
26 Head, ‘Haydn's Exoticisms’, 77.
27 Green, Power and Patriarchy, 209, note 102.
28 See Tomko, Linda J., ‘Framing Turkish Dances’, Music in Art: International Journal for Music Iconography 36/1–2 (2011), 131–159Google Scholar. The contredanse ‘La salamaleck’, published in Munich in 1718 but choreographed by Dubreuil for the Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt, also features hops combined with turns: see Dartois-Lapeyre, Françoise, ‘Turcs et turqueries dans les “représentations en musique” (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles)’, in Turcs et turqueries (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Paris: Presse de l'université Paris–Sorbonne, 2009), 186–187Google Scholar.
29 Wolff explores this trend throughout The Singing Turk. Clark and Green have each addressed issues of gender and class raised by Volpino's casting at Eszterháza as a trouser role because of personnel limitations.
30 See Ribeiro, Aileen, Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe, 1715–1789 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002)Google Scholar, especially 263–271.
31 Wolff, The Singing Turk discusses the theme of Ottoman disguises in several eighteenth-century operas.
32 See Brown, Bruce Alan, Gluck and the French Theatre in Vienna (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991)Google Scholar; and Brown, Bruce Alan, ‘French Theater and Italian Opera in Eighteenth-Century Vienna: Continuities, Cosmopolitanism, and Criticism’, in D'une scène à l'autre: l'opéra italien en Europe, two volumes, ed. Colas, Damien and Profio, Alessandro Di (Wavre: Mardaga, 2009)Google Scholar, volume 2: La musique à l’épreuve du théâtre, 153–164. See also Betzwieser, Exotismus und ‘Türkenoper’.
33 Brown, ‘French Theater and Italian Opera’, 164.
34 Boniface Charles Champée twice made an inventory of Prince Paul Anton Esterházy's music library – in 1756 and again in 1759 – and his reconstructed catalogues are reproduced in Harich, János, ‘Inventare der Esterházy-Hofmusikkapelle in Eisenstadt’, Haydn-Jahrbuch 9 (1975), 5–125Google Scholar. As Brown, Gluck and the French Theatre in Vienna, 94, has summarized, ‘in addition to the many acquisitions from his travels abroad, the Prince's library contained the music to virtually every Italian opera, opéra-comique, and ballet given in Vienna during the preceding decade and a half – clearly the result of some sort of standing arrangement’.
35 For a discussion of these wartime operas see Wolff, The Singing Turk, 128–145.