Mozart to da PonteWords and Music

Da Ponte, dear friend and collaborator, finder of words for me, this is the letter I shall never write and have always been addressing to you, my side of a conversation that has been in progress since we first began, always faintly to be heard under the music I found to fit your words, or rather, in the gap, which is not always silence, where words and music fail, and must always fail, to connnect; in our case an attempt to move between Italy and our more sober North as if there were no Alps to cross. 

It is a heavenly day – perfect October-in-Tuscany. I am alone (the others are off listening to Bach) and I have come back to thinking of the two languages and their impossible union, the compatible, incompatible marriage of two forms of experience that something in our very nature drives us to attempt, like marriage itself, but which is in the end no more than a gesture towards the reconciling of our divided selves, the one free and out of time in the eternal Now of Being, the absolute presence of Here, the other conditional on time, place and a point in both which sees itself as having a story with a beginning, a middle and a foreseeable end; the one referring only to itself, the other forever looking off towards people, and a world of dizzying distractions: cats, clouds, cars, tears, opinions. 

Words act, they get things going, they are sociable. They form unions, found cities, make contracts in which responsibilities are established and dues paid, or they break them and start wars. A sentence is a theatre in which something happens, it is all agents and events. But music is just itself. It has no story to tell, no truth to utter, and it cannot lie because it proclaims nothing but its own perfect presence. It is in that sense innocent, a form of discourse, like mathematics, that belongs to a time before we had learned to set ourselves apart by naming things or had found a name even for ourselves or one another. Music is the language of that state of grace we fell from and from which we never entirely fall. When it is so clearly at home, why should it want, as words do, to be elsewhere or yearn painfully, as words do, for before or after?

Children in the shadow 
of a ruined keep are playing 
Catch-as-catch-can 
as breathless they plunge in 
and out of history. 
Air and sunlight swing 
open. This is Today, 
the Tomorrow that is Now. 

They are solving an old puzzle. 
Their cries catch at air 
and miss, their bodies leap 
and shadows start up 
a growing fear; their own 
small selves cast deeper 
into time than Tonight even. 
They waver, they fall. 

But falling’s a kind of grace 
if they have it. Turning through air 
and sunlight, catching as catch 
can, they touch, they reach 
their late selves, the leap 
into space, towards Never 
Will Be, the hope 
made good, and kept the promise. 

They know they are breakable, 
may fail, but must jump clear 
across nine streams on the back 
of a village plough-horse, work 
their way through seven weekdays 
a week till air and water 
still and all journeys 
end Here, where Now is all. 

For music is free but may choose, and does choose, to incarnate itself and become human, as the gods in our older operas (and what are modern operas but the old ones in a new dress, with Jove in silk breeches and Semele a second housemaid?) descend from their timeless realm and a diet of ambrosia and nectar to sup broth at a peasant’s hearth. The human and unfree, the realm of agues and intrigues, of joy, loss, sorrow – this too has its attractions, even for the all-powerful, the all-pure. It is the realm of chance and the gods are gamblers. It is the realm of change, which all changeless creatures long for, even unto death. 

Music loves words as the gods love our world of unpredictable weather, as ideas, all spirit, long to be embodied in what is solid though breakable. It may be comic or tragic and is sometimes both in the same breath. That is what music comes down to when, putting off its divine abstraction, it embraces the actual. To have presided over that odd union, that marriage or liaison, may make us panders of a sort but it also makes us parents. Of that forced union, these light-limbed theatre pieces, necessarily and beautifully imperfect as they are, because entirely human, are the mortal-immortal offspring.

Yes, promise the clouds 
like ragged children, we 
are willing to come in 
to the game, willing to play, 
and yes, say the others, 
lion, sword, stone,

 
we are willing to come out 
and willing to abide 
by the rules, slowly turning, 
turning in a circle 
in the charmed field, to be 
as you wish, sunflower, tractor, 

swan, teaspoon, bone, 
or the three magic bullets. 
But what will you give, 
child, sitting alone 
on a doorstep and solemnly 
weeping, to have us 

walk in out of 
the rainy afternoon 
and join you? Will you give us 
breath? Will you call us 
by our real names? Will you tell us, 
in a whisper, your own?

You must have perceived, dear friend – how could you not have? – that D Minor weather that I conjured up for our Don was neither of the eighteenth century nor of Seville, and that it would demand some other action than the light-hearted entertainment your genius had hit upon. It struck a wrong note from the start. And when the mists cleared on an ascending scale, like the rising of a second and invisible curtain, you must have known immediately where we were. It is where we have always been; where I am now, Heaven, Hell, call it what you will. It is where all actions unfold and is as close as the breath in your mouth – I mean this world and the next in one. They are always one, which is why, dear friend, though Giovanni and the others may move through a jolly plot in one place, all avid for this and that as words make them, the victims of foolish dreams, wrong choices, an obsession with numbers and, in more than one case, a painful beating – mere whips to keep the play in motion – they have also, at the same time, to stand still in another and sing; a place where every action is already complete because it has nowhere to move to and no wish to move; and our ears have somehow to hear and accommodate both. 

Your text was so witty, so irreverent, so human, so – Italian. Forgive me that in passing through my head (remember those rough Alps) it inevitably darkened. There was no terror in your dramma giocoso, it was all light and air. Not innocent, not in the least, since it belonged entirely to a fallen world, but it was in love with surface, with the lovely changing face of things, with what is presentable – with illusion; a dimension where, by a trick of the eye, the heavy cudgel stops just short of the back it is beating so that the victim’s cries, our poor Masetto’s, are purely formal, the little hell-flames that leap up are produced with mirrors, and the only Devil, or God either for that matter, is a benign but anxious stage manager, whose one wish is to get through the performance without hitches and to send his audience home, after a few moments of vicarious alarm and a pretty tear or two, to their familiar beds, where no man is a Giovanni, though the dream may prod or threaten, and the Donnas Anna and Elvira have already settled for a carriage and a cavaliere servante. When you heard what my music had done, and became the first of my puzzled listeners, you shook your head, dear friend, nodding regretfully, and would have said, if there were not this old agreement of silence between us, ‘Yes, yes, very moving, dear fellow – a masterpiece. But why this crack in the surface of things through which real smoke rises? Couldn’t you have trusted the producer? They have machines for all that. Isn’t the theatre good enough for you? Did you have, my little genius, to throw away every chance to please? 

Ah, my friend, we belong to different worlds, you and I. It may be impossible but I wanted the thing to be real at every level. I had to pinch that silly Zerlina to prove that I was still awake, to make certain that the world was more than illusion. A nice little scream it was, all too human. It cut like a knife through that play world, even Giovanni was shocked; as if a more passionate lover, one of the gods out of an older opera, had cut in and stolen a march on him. It was me. It was my contribution to that other side of things that is not music, and not words either; which did not appear in the score and never could have; a grace note, but of a kind that precedes all civilised forms of expression, including music, and which I would like to believe that my Don really does leave room for. I wish I could be there at every performance to see that it goes well. To drive the singer up, as her flesh is caught between ghostly thumb and forefinger, to a pitch that expresses, in the most physical way, the pinch of the dark. 

I had already felt it. The whole score was my extended shriek, a Requiem can do no more. At that pitch neither words nor music can be discerned. It is the pitch at which most of the universe exists, but I had to lower it a little, tease it out, translate it back into what is accessible to our human ears. It was that, no doubt, that disturbed you and did not please. 

Our audience out there, white-armed, bejewelled, plumply settled behind their feathers or regimentally frogged, do not care for bruises or real screams, however embedded they may be in sumptuous melody. That is for later; like the flames, if they exist. But the Angel may be anywhere. We do what we can to translate his message into sound, and for those whose ears are attuned it is always audible at its own inhuman pitch. As in the pounding of an outer door. As in the dissonance that is created when three bands play at the same time and to different tempi. Or in a young girl’s off-stage scream. Even the angel’s announcement can be set to music and may sound well, as if what is given had been freely chosen after all and could not be otherwise. As indeed it cannot, though we close our ears at moments and refuse to listen. 

Forgive me, friend, my deep betrayal, my feeling for the dark. That D Minor scale leads where I had not meant to take your too-engaging play creatures: into night and fog. I too have my passages of clear and bubbling sunlight, but there are pockets of D Minor where low mists gather that will not be dispersed – and no, theatre is not enough. There is also the pesthouse, the prison, the torture chamber, like the one they tell of deep in the rocks of the Festung, even at Salzburg under the leaping bells. Music must speak for some other, deeper action than the one your words embodied. And caught between the two, between the theatre, which is all play, and the pesthouse, the prison, the torture chamber, your characters are lost and must sing more than they know, show us more than they appear to be, suffer more than even the most ingenious plot can arrange for them. In all of which they are, more than ever, alive and like us. 

Swagged garlands, pear and orange 
in stone baskets yearn 
for a nature that’s soft, 
that is, and will change; 

gilt columns support 
a blue, neither Heaven 
nor plain air, where urchins 
with sideburns peep out, 

use trumpet-call and bed-trick 
to bully the Fates, 
and a sadsack’s cuts and capers 
can make the heart break. 

Stage business: two worlds, 
the fictive, the real, 
approach, make a corner 
but do not meet. Armed heralds 

leap into the gap, 
smoke swirls, swords clatter, words 
that stroke, prick, lash, 
crack corny jokes, call up 

the dead to quick revivals, 
find breath in a rag-tag 
repertory where lovers’ 
discords, clamorous street brawls, 

wars, end in the home key, 
and fools, unotherworldly
-wise, play dead 
to fight another day. 

Pure make-believe, but played 
out in the body 
as events that are actual, 
hot tears, raised hair, stopped blood. 

And the players? Beyond pilaster 
and candleflame they stare 
back at the unruly 
mob they stand in for, 

in their mouths the dodger’s wiles, 
a mad king’s bearlike howling, 
one as our ears 
and the gallery of angels 

receive them. What we take home 
is news of transformation 
– our own, and a tune to whistle
in the dark of the tomb.