Ottoman Dynasty & European Artistes Series

History has a way of whispering its secrets – if you listen closely…

A lively melody filled the reception hall of the old Çırağan Palace. Crystal chandeliers shimmered overhead, their candlelight catching the Sultan’s diamond-encrusted orders pinned to a frock coat heavy with gold embroidery. The assembled guests sat mesmerised as the Hungarian virtuoso played, his long, elegant fingers dancing across the ivory keys.

No one listened more intently than Sultan Abdülmecid and his eldest son. The young Prince Murad, not yet seven years old, sat at his father’s side, his eyes fixed on the pianist, his body gently swaying in time with the music, his feet not quite touching the parquet floor.

The Sultan drew on his narguile. A soft, rhythmic bubbling threaded its way into the music, and a plume of perfumed smoke rose slowly into the air, drifting towards the piano.

For the briefest instant, the pianist faltered, striking a wrong note.

The unfamiliar sound, the sweet-smelling smoke, the honour of the occasion, they had all conspired to break his concentration. Most did not notice, but the Sultan did. The corner of his mouth lifted slightly beneath his neatly trimmed moustache. Had he known it was his own narguile that had caused the distraction, he would have been mortified.

The music continued, regaining its momentum, building towards its close. Murad leant forward, willing the performance to last just a little longer, his hands clasped tightly in his lap. When the final note was played, there was a moment of silence – and then Sultan Abdülmecid rose, leading the rapturous applause.

Franz Liszt, already the toast of Europe’s royal salons, had found acclaim at the Imperial Ottoman Court.

And for one young prince in particular, it was a performance he would never forget.

The Virtuoso in Istanbul

Liszt arrived by ship in Istanbul on 8^th June 1847 at the height of his fame. He was personally greeted by Giuseppe Donizetti Pasha, the Sultan’s Master of Music, who had arranged the visit. Donizetti Pasha had modernised the Ottoman military bands under Sultan Mahmud II and played a pivotal role in introducing European-style music to the Imperial Court.

Soon after his arrival, Liszt was granted an audience with Sultan Abdülmecid. “I was greatly surprised that His Majesty was so aware of my fame,” he later wrote. The Sultan presented him with the Order of Glory (Nişân-ı İftihâr), along with a jewelled snuffbox as a mark of his esteem.

Liszt performed twice at the Çırağan Palace. Aware of Abdülmecid’s fondness for Italian opera, he chose his programme with care, including the Andante from Lucia di Lammermoor by Gaetano Donizetti, the brother of the Sultan’s Master of Music, Casta Diva from Bellini’s opera Norma, and concluding with Rossini’s rousing William Tell Overture. The selection was both diplomatic and dazzling.

During his five-week stay in Istanbul, he also performed at the Russian Embassy in Pera, at the Hotel d’Europe, and at the Franchini mansion in Büyükdere. Tickets were priced at 100 kuruş, and, in keeping with his reputation, the proceeds were given to charitable causes.

In addition to performing in the imperial capital, Liszt worked on a variation of the Mecidiye March, composed by Donizetti Pasha. He entitled the piece Grande Paraphrase de la Marche de Giuseppe Donizetti, and played it at his second concert before the Sultan. Offered as a tribute, it was received with great appreciation.

The Piano

In the winter of 1846, Sultan Abdülmecid commissioned a piano from the Parisian maker Érard, one of the most celebrated manufacturers of the time. The arrangements were overseen by Donizetti Pasha, who conducted a detailed correspondence with the workshop regarding the instrument’s design. One of these letters, now preserved in the Topkapı Palace Museum archives, records that it was purchased for 4,000 French francs.

By the time Liszt arrived in Istanbul, the piano had been installed at the Çırağan Palace, where it would be used for his performances before the Sultan. Writing on August 5^th 1847, Liszt thanked Pierre Érard for the instrument, describing it as “truly powerful and exceptional.”

Unusually, soon after the concerts at the Çırağan Palace, the piano was sold to a young Ottoman man as a gift for his fiancée, for the sum of 160 Turkish lira. Liszt reflected on its fate as “a truly romantic destiny,” one he added, that “it richly deserves it for its classical qualities.”

Father and Son

Sultan Abdülmecid was, in many ways, the embodiment of a changing empire. Continuing the reforms of his father, Sultan Mahmud II, he presided over a period of profound transformation known as the Tanzimat – a programme of westernisation that sought to bring the Ottoman state into closer alignment with Europe. This spirit of reform extended beyond law and administration into culture, taste, and daily life. The embrace of Western music at Court was not incidental, but part of a broader vision of modernisation.

For his eldest son, Prince Murad, the visit of Franz Liszt to Istanbul would prove life-altering. Listening to the Hungarian virtuoso that night became the catalyst for a lifelong devotion to music. And since Liszt had performed on an Érard piano, Murad dreamt of playing one himself. Recognising his son’s passion, Abdülmecid ordered a piano from the Parisian maker a few years later. It arrived in Istanbul in the spring of 1861. By then, the Sultan’s health was failing. Rather than wait to present it on Murad’s twenty-first birthday, as he had intended, he chose to give it to him at once.

Murad was overwhelmed. It would be the last gift he received from his father. Within months, Abdülmecid was dead.

Murad would go on to become a gifted composer and pianist, recognised today for the sensitivity and sophistication of his music. The origins of that talent lay in a concert held at the Çırağan Palace, and in a father who understood what it had awakened in his son.

Traces of Music

During his visit to Istanbul, Franz Liszt stayed at the home of the piano maker, Alexander Kommendinger in Pera. The house is no longer there, but on what was then called Polonya Sokak, now Nur-u Ziya Sokak, close to the former residence of the French ambassador, a plaque marks the spot where it once stood, reminding passers-by of the time when Franz Liszt came to Istanbul.

The old Çırağan Palace is also long gone, but in its place stands the present-day Çırağan Palace, where Sultan Murad V languished for twenty-eight years in enforced confinement. It is now a luxury hotel, but as you gaze up at its stone façade, you can almost imagine the deposed sultan seated at his Érard piano, music drifting out of the windows and across the Bosphorus.

That piano still survives. Its voice, softened by time, has not been silenced. It remains in the private collection of the descendants of Sultan Murad V. And perhaps, one day, Grande Paraphrase de la Marche de Giuseppe Donizetti by Franz Liszt will be played upon its keys.

Until we meet again in the next Sultan’s Salon…

History has a way of whispering its secrets – if you listen closely…

In the gardens of Defterdarburnu Palace, the warm breeze carried the scent of lilac, acacia, and roses. Somewhere below, from the waterfront pavilions, the low sound of ney flutes drifted across the Bosphorus, its surface catching the light like burnished silver. Paths led into a maze laid out in the European style, and at its centre, on a marble bench, Hadice Sultan sat with a letter in her hands.

She recognised the handwriting at once. The words were Turkish, yet formed in Latin letters, carefully spelt out phonetically. He had never mastered the Arabic script. She breathed in the perfumed air and sighed.

This garden was his as much as it was hers. It was he who designed every path, every flowerbed, every view, creating a secluded paradise on the Bosphorus where she found peace. For years he had worked here under her patronage, rising to the position of Imperial Architect to her brother, Sultan Selim III, until he fell from favour, and was forbidden a place in her world.

Hadice unfolded the letter from Antoine Melling and began to read it.

The Artist

Antoine Ignace Melling arrived in Istanbul in 1784, trained in architecture and mathematics, and having served his apprenticeship under his uncle, a former court painter to the Margrave of Baden. Over the next two decades, he would become one of the most remarkable visual chroniclers of the Imperial Ottoman capital, producing drawings, engravings, and paintings that preserve a world now long vanished.

He began modestly, as an art tutor to the children of European diplomats living in Pera, while also accepting private commissions. Among his earliest patrons was the Danish ambassador, Baron Frederik von Hübsch, for whom he designed the gardens of his official residence.

It was here that his work first came to the attention of Hadice Sultan, the cultured and intellectually curious half-sister of Sultan Selim III. Encountering his designs, she was immediately struck by their refinement, and by the mind that conceived them.

The Princess

Hadice was no ordinary Ottoman princess. The beloved sister and close confidante of Sultan Selim III, she shared many of his ideas. Her brother, the reformist sultan, was cautiously opening windows towards the West, introducing military reforms, encouraging European artistic influences, and cultivating intellectual exchange. His court became a place where music, architecture, and art flourished. It was precisely the kind of environment in which a young man like Melling could thrive.

Hadice was an avid collector of porcelain from France, Austria, and Saxony, and experimented with Western decorative fashions, transforming her palaces into elegant fusions of Ottoman tradition and European neoclassical design. Her patronage was discerning, guided by an instinct for beauty, harmony, and innovation.

In Melling, she recognised something rare. Not simply a skilled artist, but a kindred spirit. It was a recognition that would draw them unexpectedly together.

An Unlikely Friendship

From the moment Melling entered her orbit, his role extended far beyond that of a conventional architect. Under Hadice’s patronage, he became what the art historian Elisabeth A. Fraser describes in Mediterranean Encounters: Artists Between Europe and the Ottoman Empire 1774-1839 as a ‘kind of artistic director in residence.’ He designed the layout and gardens of Defterdarburnu Palace and advised on the furnishings and interior decoration of all the princess’ residences, overseeing details as minute as pearls sewn into embroidered napkins.

Hadice’s patronage also brought him close to Sultan Selim III, who recognised both his technical skill and his rare ability to observe the Ottoman world without caricature or exoticism. Melling was commissioned to renovate the Sultan’s summer palace in Beşiktaş, and produced panoramic drawings and luminous, naturalistic watercolours that captured the rhythms of daily life – outings in the parks, elegant women travelling by caïque, wedding processions winding through the streets, and waterfront palaces shimmering along the Bosphorus.

Unlike many Western Orientalist painters, he came to understand Ottoman customs and traditions and was consequently granted unprecedented access to the most private areas of the imperial court. The result was extraordinary: a body of work that includes rare and sensitive depictions of the imperial harem, unmatched in their detail. As the novelist Orhan Pamuk observed, Melling “saw his city like an Istanbulite but painted it like a clear-eyed Westerner.”

All of it unfolded under Hadice’s discerning eye. She even had an apartment built for Melling within her palace complex, an arrangement that did not pass without comment. And all the while, she did something almost unthinkable for an Ottoman princess of her time. She corresponded directly with him.

Many of their surviving letters have since been published. Their contents are practical rather than intimate, filled with discussions of furnishings and design ideas. Yet even so, rumours inevitably followed. Whispers circulated, suggesting a closeness that extended beyond the boundaries of patronage – and propriety.

A Final Letter

Melling fell out of favour. Sultan Selim was angered by his sister’s inappropriate friendship with him, while Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt inflamed anti-French sentiment amongst the Ottoman elite. His stipend stopped and Hadice was told to sever all contact.

Melling wrote a final letter to his former patron, a letter the princess might have read in the maze he had designed in the gardens of Defterdarburnu Palace.

‘Your Highness, on Saturday, I, your humble servant, sent my manservant to collect my monthly stipend. They told him it has been stopped… After seeing so much kindness from Your Highness, I could not believe this order came from you… Winter is coming… The landlord wants the rent… I entreat you, I have been left without a coin to my name… Your Highness, I implore you not to abandon me.’

She never replied.

Melling left Istanbul and settled in Paris. There, he published his monumental Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople et des rives du Bosphore, a lavish collection of engravings documenting the breathtaking beauty of Istanbul. At a time when fascination with all things Ottoman, known as Turquerie, had become fashionable, the work caused a sensation, attracting many admirers, including the newly crowned Empress Josephine.

An Enduring Legacy

Today, much of the Istanbul that Melling painted has vanished. Fires, demolition, and the relentless reinvention of the city have erased many of the wooden palaces, gardens, and panoramas he once knew. Yet, his engravings and paintings remain among the most important records of Istanbul during the time of Sultan Selim III and his beloved sister, Hadice Sultan.

Today, when we walk along the Bosphorus, it is easy to admire its unique beauty without pausing to consider how much has been lost. But to truly appreciate the city Melling loved, I invite you to visit the shores of Ortaköy and Kuruçeşme at sunset. The palaces, gardens, and caiques may be gone, but the curve of the Bosphorus remains unchanged. Stand by the water as evening falls and it becomes easier to imagine Hadice Sultan once wandering through the maze designed by a young French architect, unaware that their story would endure long after the garden itself had disappeared.

Until we meet again in the next Sultan’s Salon…