Long before the grand theatres of nineteenth-century Pera, before the Naum Theatre, and almost two centuries before the Atatürk Cultural Centre, opera made its first known appearance in Istanbul behind the doors of a diplomatic residence.
On 22 February 1786, the Swedish Embassy in Pera — the historic Palais de Suède on today’s İstiklal Caddesi — hosted what is regarded as the earliest documented performance of an Italian opera in Istanbul, and in the Ottoman world.
Istanbul in the 18th Century, painting by Antoine de Favray
The evening was organised by the Swedish ambassador Gerhard von Heidenstam, an unusually musical diplomat who appears to have adapted or composed material for the production and conducted the orchestra himself. The performers were not professional opera singers but members of Pera’s European diplomatic community. Among them were Heidenstam’s wife, the wife and daughter of the Spanish ambassador, and other members of the diplomatic corps.
Don Juan de Bouligny, Spain’s first permanent ambassador to Constantinople was one of the audience at the first opera in Istanbul
The opera is generally identified as La scuola de’ gelosi — “The School of Jealousy”, an enormously successful comic opera associated with composer Antonio Salieri and librettist Caterino Mazzolà. The work had first appeared in Venice in 1778, although the precise form performed in Istanbul may have been adapted by Heidenstam for his amateur cast.
It must have been an extraordinary evening. Outside lay eighteenth-century Pera, a district of embassies, merchants, dragomans and foreign communities overlooking the Ottoman capital. Inside the Swedish residence, diplomats and their families dressed in costume and performed an Italian comic opera accompanied by an orchestra.
Heidenstam later wrote that the spectacle, the first of its kind, had caused “a great sensation in Pera.”
Opera would eventually travel beyond the diplomatic salons. Sultan Selim III, himself a composer and musician, became the first Ottoman sultan known to have watched an opera, with a foreign company performing before him in 1797. By the nineteenth century, opera had become part of Istanbul’s public cultural life, flourishing in theatres such as the Bosco and Naum theatres in Beyoğlu.
Sultan Selim III
But its Istanbul story appears to have begun on a winter evening in 1786, not beneath the chandeliers of a great opera house, but in the intimate rooms of the Swedish Embassy in Pera.
Note that the video is embedded via YouTube and all rights belong to the respective rights holders.
