Words and Music in Opera

A few decades ago it was the fashion to look at a picture such as the Rubens 'Judgement of Paris' and see both a certain composition of diagonals and pyramids and a certain sensuous contrast between the painted textures of naked human flesh, landscape and peacock, and yet deliberately to exclude from one's mind - because, not being visual, it can't in the literal sense be seen - the information that one of the naked women is Juno and that is why there is a peacock in the picture.

To behave like this is certainly artificial: it is to bite back the first, childish question that comes to mind when you happen on the picture. If you happened on three naked women and a peacock in the course of a country walk instead of a visit to the National Gallery, you would certainly seek an explanation - just as the purists who make a point of not reading the libretto before sitting through Lucia di Lammermoor would certainly demand what was going on were they staying in a Scottish country-house party when a girl suddenly ran downstairs in a bloodstained nightdress.

Still, to be artificial is not necessarily wrong in artistic manners, art being by definition artificial. This particular artificiality, however, seems to me mistaken because it is not necessary. It is not a case of training and concentrating the mind on the work of art by excluding anything which could distract and interfere. It is, rather, an inhibition of an irrational kind; the 'literary' element is dreaded simply through superstition; were it admitted, it would not interfere and might enhance.

Of course, if you had to opt for either composition and texture or the 'story' of the picture, you would be bound to take the former, because those are exclusive to Rubens and constitute what is masterly in the masterpiece, whereas the subject of the Judgement of Paris is shared by several quite indifferent painters. But there is no need to choose - any more than there is to choose between words and music in opera. The mind is quite sophisticated enough to take in that one and the same area of paint is both a splendid rendering of peacock-texture and the emblem of a goddess, or that one and the same sound of a certain frequency is both top C and the heroine's shriek of distress. With all respect to the debate between the composer and the poet in Capriccio, there really is no dispute; if it's a question of which is first in importance, the music wins hands down; and it is, of course, one's musical ear one takes to the opera house: but if the experience should also happen to delight one's literary ear (as happened in the 1960s with the revelation of Congreve's words in Semele), it would be the most wantonly puritanical defiance of the Life Force to slip in an ear-plug. Literary pleasure is not anti-musical but a happy bonus - as though a person one was in love with anyway turned out also to have won on a Premium Bond.

Brigid Brophy, Reads (London, Sphere Books Ltd 1989) pp. 21-22