A new meaning for D flat major

By Robert Finn

Music critic

One thing among many that kept me listening to and watching the recent live telecast of "Tosca" from the Metropolitan Opera was curiosity to see what the contrivers of the English subtitles would do about the R-rated text of Cavaradossi's big aria in the last act.

Puccini was the most openly erotic of all composers (his closest rival being perhaps Massenet), and this spot in "Tosca" is one of those places in the world of music where things get pretty steamy. But the point has been carefully concealed in every English version of “Tosca” I have ever come across.

Opera goers and voice recital audiences have been listening to that lush aria with great pleasure for years. Most of them are unaware of the lines in which Cavaradossi remembers with salacious pleasure how he would tremble as he removed Tosca's clothes from her body during their love trysts.

It's all there in plain Italian. In fact, Puccini badgered his librettists mercilessly until they abandoned their previous ideas and put it there. It was what he wanted.

The standard English translation sanctioned by Puccini's publishers was some prudish nonsense about Tosca's "matchless symmetry of form and feature." Bosh.

This is far from the only instance in which great music deals in explicit detail with sexual matters. The glory of it, of course, is that the addition of music puts the experience on a whole new aesthetic level in which the alleged impropriety of the subject simply doesn't matter much.

A perfect example is the orchestral prelude to Strauss' "Der Rosenkava-

“IT MAY BE

Music

lier," a favorite with opera and concert audiences for over 60 years. What this lovely music is actually about is the night of love spent by Octavian and the Marschallin just prior to the rise of the curtain. The significance of the whooping horns at bar 30 is about as explicit as music can get on such matters.

Strauss' stage directions as the curtain rises preserve the proprieties, but only barely. Octavian is disclosed "kneeling on a footstool" beside the bed, half-embracing the Marschallin who is still in bed. Really, now. That is wholly implausible, not to say ridiculous, is it not?

Even Mozart is not immune from this sort of thing. Remember the series of horn calls that punctuate Figaro's great diatribe against women in the last act of "Figaro"? They occur at the words "Il resto nol dico, gia ognuna lo sa," as Figaro insists that wives are inevitably faithless to their husbands. Horns the kind you find on animals are the universal symbol for the cheated husband. Mozart just translated them into music.

Even the chaste recital stage is open to sexual suggestiveness. There is, for one example, a huge series of piano pieces by the Czech composer Zdenek Fibich in which he carefully chronicles in sound every detail of his relationship with a young mistress. There are pieces descriptive of her hair, her neck, her knees, her toes. And there are musical evocations of her sexual encounters with Fibich.

When Wagner's "Tristan" was new it was condemned fully as much for the erotic suggestiveness of its music (particularly the second act love duet) as for its advanced musical language. Clergymen thundered against it as "nudity set to music," a musical aphrodisiac.

What is interesting about that was that the effect was almost entirely musical, not literary, even though the work was an opera. The text of that love duet is a highly involved series of philosophical meditations in rather tortured German. It is hard to translate into English that makes any kind of sense at all, let alone English that might offend anyone. But ah, that music, full of sensuous longing and patently physical desire!

Right now there is a minor controversy in progress among Chopinologists over the authenticity of certain letters that Chopin may or may not have written to the Countess Delfina Potocka. These letters refer to amatory escapades in explicitly bawdy terms. If they are in fact genuine, they give a new meaning, among other things, to the key of D flat major. Can it be that the celebrated "Raindrop” prelude was not really about raindrops at all?

This sort of thing scandalizes many music lovers. The idea that the great composers let such thoughts creep into their heads and even into their works bothers them no end.

They prefer to think of composers as marble statues rather than as human

beings. But it is not so, as even a casual glance at their biographies shows.

So the next time you hear "Rosenkavalier," do not be scandalized. The music has not changed. It is the same prelude you have been listening to with untroubled pleasure for many years. Knowing what the music describes, you are at least better off than those Clevelanders who once registered objections to the opera's "homosexual overtone" because Octavian was being sung by a

woman.