Long before the Turkish State Opera opened in 1949, Halide Edip Adıvar was among those imagining what Turkish opera might sound like. In this conversation Jonathan Conlin asks Ici Vanwesenbeeck to explain how this remarkable polymath conceived of an opera that was neither alla franca nor alla turca.

e-mail: vanwesen@fredonia.edu

Ici is a professor of literature at the State University of New York, Fredonia.

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In a short story of 1938 Halide Edip Adıvar transported the reader into the future, imagining a music competition taking place in 1955. The conceit of a future contest challenging Turkish composers to write an opera set in Istanbul allowed the author to reflect on how an art form seemingly wedded to a court-centred cosmopolitanism could transcend the sound-worlds of “old” and “new” Turkey and be accessible to a broad audience. In this conversation, recorded on 20 May 2025, Ici begins by explaining how she came to research Halide Edip’s thinking about opera, and briefly outlines the historiographical state of play. She interprets the 1938 story as a response to a 1934 opera competition won by The Village Wedding, a work still in the repertoire today. Although Halide Edip was in exile for much of the period under discussion (1924-1939), she used her voice to challenge Ziya Gökalp and others who viewed Turkish music as degenerate. Drawing on encounters with Italian opera and Wagner’s Ring Cycle at performances inside Yildiz palace during the late Ottoman period, yet cherishing “the east in the Turk’s heart”, she developed a model of east-west musical synthesis that avoided the pitfalls of pastiche, and put the local in place of the national. Rather than resulting in a musical motley, made up of “separate pieces put on a mannequin unstitched”, Halide Edip argued that synthesis could produce something with an authenticity all its own.

She is always remembered as someone who coins the term Turkey Faces West, the title of her 1930 book. I always take that as more of a question, because her book ends with an epilogue entitled “Whither Turkey?”, which is a question that’s still with us today. And she applies that to music: “Whither Turkish Opera?”

Episode 68 – Composing New Turkey

Podcasts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne Conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.