If you opened the book to page 162 you would see a portrait print of Ludwig Fischer, the basso in Vienna for whom Mozart composed the great Turkish role of Osmin the pasha’s overseer. Osmin rages against the European foreigners and tries to obstruct the “abduction” from the seraglio, but he is finally dismissed by the magnanimous Turkish pasha at the finale, and thus prevented from taking his bloodthirsty vengeance against the European captives. It was the “bottomless deep” of Fischer’s low-notes that inspired Mozart to invest himself musically in the creation of this role, and, turning the page to 163, you’ll find me quoting Mozart’s long letter of 1781 in which the great composer reflected upon how Osmin’s extreme rage and ugly vengeful emotions could be contained within a musical structure that would still seem beautiful to the public. The Abduction from the Seraglio was actually the most popular of Mozart’s operas during his lifetime, precisely because it was written for a public that craved Turkish subjects; for Mozart it was his second effort at a Turkish opera, after the unfinished Zaide. And he would return to Turkishness again in Cosi fan tutte with the lovers comically disguised as Ottoman Albanians.“A person who gets into such a rage oversteps all order, measure, and object,” wrote Mozart in the long letter to his father about Osmin. It was perhaps the most detailed letter he ever wrote analyzing the music of one of his own operatic characters. Music, of course, had to maintain order and measure in Mozart’s world of classical harmony, and Mozart himself was constantly trying to tame his own rages in real life. He was an angry young man in 1781, only 25 years old, and it was just then, in a rage, that he broke with his patron the Archbishop of Salzburg and began to try to support himself as an independent musician in Vienna, trying to please the public with operas like The Abduction from the Seraglio. On the following page, 165, I quote Mozart’s reference to “this stupid, coarse, and malicious Osmin,” but I argue in the book that Mozart really recognizes something of himself in Osmin, and that’s what makes the character so brilliantly human and helps to bridge the cultural divide between the Turkish and European characters in the opera. On page 166, I show a rare illustration of a costume design for Osmin, created for a production in Koblenz in 1787, and it shows clearly that for all his coarseness and comical malice, he was certainly a figure of some operatic dignity on the stage.I’m eager to have readers think more deeply about the long history of how Europe has contemplated Turkey, and how the West has regarded the Islamic world. I want to encourage readers to consider how opera intersects with history and to think about musical issues as an important part of European cultural history — crossing the disciplinary lines that sometimes separate us as historians from our colleagues in the music department. I’d like to invite readers into a lost and largely forgotten world of musical and dramatic entertainments, and try to give a sense of their cultural and political meanings for people who would have been going to the opera in the eighteenth century. To give a sense of the music, I’ve also created a website that would allow readers to listen to relevant excerpts from the music of Singing Turk operas while they are reading my book. I hope that readers will find that a useful resource.One great thing that we were able to do at NYU was to stage an academic symposium about the book, combined with the live performance of musical selections from the operas, and it’s also possible to have a look at the video and audio of that symposium.Finally, I’m excited to see that some of these operas are being performed today. Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio is, of course, regularly performed, and I wrote about it in The New York Times when it was performed at the Metropolitan Opera in the spring of 2016. But I was also excited to see Il Turco in Italia (The Turk in Italy) performed in a brilliant production at the Rossini Pesaro festival in summer 2016, and Pesaro will produce two more Rossini operas from this tradition in summer 2017, La pietra del paragone and Le siège de Corinthe. I’d love it if my book contributed to a renewal of current interest in these fascinating works, which have a lot to offer for thinking about the Western relation to the Islamic world, including cultural encounters and mutual misunderstandings, back when these operas were composed and still today.