SEX AND SILENCE: COMTE D'ORSAY, ROSSINI'S PARODY OF OPERA'S EROTIC DREAM

Published in Glyndebourne Festival Opera Programme 1998

" Music is a woman", said Wagner in Opera and Drama. But the poet, of course, is a man. Teeming with logic and words, he makes love to sensuous female music. And what do you get? Opera: sex between music and words. "Words and music saying 'I love you' to each other", in the phrase of a critic exploring opera's importance to male gay sensibility. Gay or straight, opera is about sex. About bodies and feelings: their pleasure and pain when they meet, the way they disguise themselves in a complex world where profound emotional truths lunge at you out of artificial situations and conventions. Where - as in sex - the rawest feelings can be turned to gold. In opera's case, to golden sound.

No one knew all this better than Rossini, who built on Mozart's legacy in the sunnier land that first invented opera. Rossini's operas defined the nature of opera for the first half of the nineteenth century and did not fade from the centre of Italian operatic life until Verdi arrived on the scene. He became a bit of myth himself, for his operas coincided with (and helped to promote) an important change from the eighteenth to the nineteeth century in the image of the composer. From being a craftsman he became a creative artist. Rossini was famous for his prodigality: his sensuous appetite for life. (Think of one of his sideline inventions, Tournedos Rossini: egg on steak, two proteins for the price of one.) He was prodigiously energetic in his composing life, prodigiously indolent in his physical life. According to one story he loved composing in bed; one morning a half-finished aria slithered to the floor. Too lazy to bend down to get it (or did he not want to lose a drop of his cream-topped coffee?), he wrote a whole new aria instead.

He was also famous for his sense of humour. In his portrait you see a fat man in a stiff waistcoat with wicked glinty eyes and a mouth just holding back before it cracks the next joke. Here is the indolent gourmet, but also the raconteur, the fizzing centre of a Paris salon, pausing a moment to look respectable. Sensual appetite plus pine-needle sharp humour are the hallmark of le Comte Ory, the first real fruit of the change of direction Rossini took when he left Italy in October 1823 to take up a post in Paris the following year, as Director at the Theatre-Italién. At thirty-one, he was the most important, the most popular composer of his day. He had written thirty-four Italian operas; some were staples of the repertory throughout Italy. In Paris, he enjoyed directing and managing - he launched Meyebeer's career and brought in Italian singers - but wanted to create operas in French himself.

Two years later, though he kept up his involvement in management, he re-negotiated a deal which let him spend most of his time writing music. Apart from a slight piece to mark the coronation of Charles X (Il viaggio a Reims), what he did first (1826-7) was revise two of his own Neapolitan operas, The Siege of Corinth and Moses. To make them "French", he planed down florid single arias and moved towards larger units, combining solo voice and chorus more dramatically. It was, if you like, a drive towards the teamwork that makes a scene, rather than concentration on a single line: you can't help feeling he had been affected by directing an opera house, was thinking in a directorly as well as composerly way.

But then, he always had gone on developing as a dramatist. He was bound to really, for the enormous natural gift he had when he started was a flair for overture. As you can see from the fact that so many of his overtures are cornerstones of the orchestral repertoire today. The art of the overture is setting a musical scene and Rossini had a genius for this. You do not go to him for the treasures offered by the great operas of Mozart and Verdi: to plunge into wells of individual feeling and profound melody supported by earth-moving harmony. What matters in Rossini is something fundamental to his gift for making "overtures" to an audience. He serves up thematic titbits, just the right amount in an enticing fashion; he lays out his optimistic, sensual vision of the world: how its elements, musical and social, combine in a dance of emotional well-being.

In his dramatic development, he extended this gift until it reaches a mad climax in bed, in the second act of Comte Ory. After his French re-writes of his own work, he embarked on the last two operas of his career, le Comte Ory and William Tell. In Ory, thinking in terms of ensemble rather than individual, he extended his dramatic range and forged an important link in the chain that led to grand opera, by uniting Italian lyricism to something particularly French. What he encountered in Paris was declamation, friskily expressed in the resident genius of opéra comique. Opéra comique descended from French vaudeville, from comedies interspersed with song. It set out to parody the lyrical and pompously historical or mythological tragedy of standard opera. It was entrenched in Paris as a cocktail of fun plus hybrid sound: spoken dialogue counterpointed with musical passages. An up-beat end was essential. Forty years after Rossini, Bizet's opera Carmen was produced at the Opéra Comique in 1875. (The opéra-comique style with spoken dialogue has been restored on recent recordings.) One Director of the Opéra Comique resigned because Carmen spectacularly failed to deliver the all-lived-happily-ever-after dénouement: which shows how passionately Parisians felt about the feel-good spirit of their genre.

Rossini played safer than Bizet. In le Comte Ory, the first major opera he wrote in French for the Parisians, he made sure he got the feel of opéra comique even though he composed it all through with no spoken dialogue. He also made sure he got a fashionable librettist (PR came as naturally to him as an appetite for steak) and flattered French sensibility by setting his piece in the Moyen Age, in a Crusades context. The Comte plot comes from a mediaeval ballad; Rossini uses its tune in the orchestral prelude and second act drinking chorus. He signalled the comfortingly comic, feel-good factor by the setting of his first Act. Traditionally, a rustic setting was a sign of non-seriousness. Not until Verdi (in Luisa Miller) did a rustic scene get to be background to fullblown tragedy; though from 1817, in La Gazza Ladra (and later in La Somnabula), Rossini himself had begun to dream up rustic settings for tragi-comedy. Rossini was not just Paris-pleasing. What he did, superbly, in Comte Ory - what sitting next-door to the Opéra Comique in Paris enabled him to do - was parody the essential ingredients of opera, which he must have seemed better qualified than anyone, at that date, to understand. (It is true that the date of the piece, 1828, coincides with Beethoven deafly conducting the first performance of his own Ninth Symphony, and you might think Fidelio, with its cross-dressing, its woman pretending to be a man and appalled when a woman falls in love with her, suggests a more profound understanding of the form on a grander scale - but never mind, Rossini was the man for opera in the public eye.)

A good parody tells you important things about what it is taking off. In le Comte Ory you get all the operatic ingredients straight (as it were) from any Idiot's Guide to Opera. Seduction and misunderstanding, cross-dressing, female suffering, innocence under threat. "Noble women face male lechery with nothing to help them but their fears and gullibility", your telegram might read. Adele is as complicitly gullible in her courtly way as the peasant girls queuing for a few minutes alone with the lecherous "hermit". Here is the adoring young page whose good intentions the villain miconstrues to the heroine. Here is a castle, symbol of chastity, under threat. But noble sentiments (like those voiced by the women of the court when they rescue the drenched bevy of refugee nuns) are turned on their head when these same women make sure the returning crusaders never know what went on. Religion and integrity are under threat too; but nobody minds. The Comte disguises himself as a holy man, and then as a nun, to get into the castle and Adele's bed. Sex, lies, religion and disguise, the struggle between good and bad, are all nicely held in play and vanish into thin air at the end. In true opéra comique spirit, the pastiche exposes the obsessions of serious opera; and then says they're not worth bothering about.

Above all, Rossini's parody brings out opera's intense eroticism. Using a woman as the centre of emotional pain, endangered by her innocence, generosity or curiosity, is a classic ploy of tragedy from the Greeks on, and fundamental to opera. Think of all the women in opera like Violetta, Butterfly, Gilda, or the Countess in Figaro, whom male librettists and composers use as image of the hurt human condition. Ariadne abandoned by her lover is "symbol of human solitude" says the male Composer in Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos. Poulenc's opera La Voix Humaine is that of a modern Ariadne, on the phone to her faithless lover. In tragedy - both literary and musical - woman is man's favourite image of lonely inner pain. The driving force of Rossini's plot - as of innumerable operas, plays, novels and poems since the Greeks - is a man trying to get inside a woman. This is not always (as it is here) just sex. Violetta in Traviata is used to men in her body; that's OK, that's her life. What alarms and endangers her is Alfredo demanding entry to her heart. And this parallels the way Verdi himself "gets into" her - and lets us, the audience, in too. The whole history of tragedy and opera is a basically sexual act of imagination: a male author creating a woman in order to enter into her. (The opposite became possible in nineteenth-century novels; George Eliot, for instance, "enters" her male characters intimately.) Rossini's villain, scheming to get into Adele's castle, bed, and body, is an icing-sugar version of the fundamental aim of tragic opera - that product of male imagination which rests on earlier male work like the wickedly sensuous Latin poet Ovid (source of much Renaissance opera, especially in his tales of women's tragic histories, the Heroides) - to get inside a woman.

Rossini also parodies an even more central aspect of opera's erotic energy: something peculiar to opera, with its cross-dressing, sexual disguise and pretence, its mad conventions of discrepancy between body and voice. The history of opera, with female "parts" composed for castrated men dressed as women, and male "parts" written for sopranos en travesti, in trousers, is a quite extraordinary erotic tale. Opera-goers are so used to it they forget how weird it is. Rossini doesn't: le Comte Ory brings out its full erotic insanity. A courtly villain and his band of yobs, dressed as nuns? Think Marquis de Sade: think Justine, whose heroine is captured by lechers dressed as monks who make their girl-victims dress as nuns. A young man full of lust and love, sung by a mezzo soprano? We are used to that OK - but this young page is not merely dressed up as a woman on stage like Cherubin. This soprano pretends she is a man pretending he is a woman in bed with a man.

The bed scene, the trio of Act Two, "A la faveur de cette nuit obscure", is the opera's piece de résistance. Rossini brings off the most daring sexual disguising possible. Berlioz (who began by disliking Rossini very much iundeed, when he first arrived in Paris, but was won deeply over in the end) dubbed this trio Rossini's masteriece. Which is even more true dramatically than musically. The scene parodies to perfection opera's denial of sexual reality in the service of musical bliss. The music - glass-smooth, with moments of spun-crystal soprano agitation - is a sonic screen for a pornographic dream. Here is a double seduction, three people in one bed. Try describing it to a twelve-year-old and you see how complicated and risqué it really is: a man dressed as a nun, who thinks he is seducing a woman; a man lying between the two, passing on to the woman the "favours" lavished on him by the Comte, sung by a woman. "He" is literally between man and woman: he is made love to as a woman but makes love like a man. Each of the three has a bit of "woman" in them.

And the voices? "Permettez moi!" "C'est moi!" These announcements of sexual identity mean the opposite of what they say. What you hear is a trio sung by two female voices and a male, supposedly two men and a woman. One of the men thinks he is singing a duet: he can be fooled because the "other man's" voice is really a woman's. The director can have fun with the Comte's discovery of his male rival by other signs than voice: like "his" shoes. But Rossini had the first fun, making Isolier's voice camouflage itself inside Adele's.

In all this, Rossini brings out brilliantly how opera's sexual disguisings depend on hiding and silence: how opera is all about sex but pretends not to be. The composer Thomas Ades, in his recent opera Powder Her Face, gets at this a different way. His Duchess is silent because she is busy: you can't sing, in a fellatio scene. Ades is interested in the sexual implications of opera's silence; Rossini, in opera's denial of sexual reality. One voice hides behind another in musical seduction - as if Cherubino came dancing into Don Giovanni's duet with Zerlina, "La ci darem la mano".

The operatic world - like rock music, an equally male creation - reflects a male dream of sex with almost total silence about its consequences. Very few pregnancies; no sexually transmitted disease. Rossini is getting at this sort of silence too. He had written many operas for Naples, the first European home of syphilis. Syphilis was "the Neapolitan disease", the great unmentioned thing. (Schubert, of course, died of it.) In 1828, the year le Comte Ory was produced, advertisements for syphilis cures circulated in pamphlets all over Paris with moralizing warnings like this one from a doctor who wants to sell men a "lustral lotion": "Modern man is less prudent than the savage who, sheltering under a shred of fabric, scans the dark night of the desert defying the lion and jaguar. Civilized man, behind the golden panelling of a palace, falls prey to a disease which the simplest of precautions would enable him to avoid." His warning echoes, and must be influenced by, the classic operatic scenario, enacted for example in the torture scene of Tosca, but also much earlier in the hidden brutalities of Nero in L'Incoronazione di Poppaea: barbarism and danger lurk in the bowels of the palace, in the most "polite" and elaborate structures of civilization. Rossini parodies a genre to which sex is central, but which is silent about what follows from sex in real life.

By convention and tradition, opera arrives at its truths via silence about a good eighty per cent of the real world. Wagner did not approve of what Rossini did to opera. "The amazingly lucky relationship between Poet and Composer, which we see in Mozart's masterwork, we see completely vanishing again in the further evolution of opera until Rossini quite abolished it, making absolute melody the only authentic factor of opera", he complained. Liszt said the melodies in Comte d'Ory flow like champagne - the perfect musical party. But is all this really "absolute melody"? I defy you to come out of this opera humming an actual tune (except maybe the sopranos' dizzy reaction to the Comte in "A la faveur...") What most people come away with is an impression of melody. You get a sense of musical texture and contrast ("Noble chateleine", sung by a nun quartet a capella, Palestrina-style, runs straight into the drinking song "Ah! qu'il avait du bon vin."). You get an aural memory of voices climbing higher and ever higher over each other. You remember tunefulness rather than actual tunes.

The impression of melody comes really, I believe, from an intense rhythmic vitality, from vocal richness, orchestral colour, and harmonic refinement in the vocal writing: all the flesh of sensuality, turned into sound, with the voices (both human and instrumental) moving sexily, silkily against each other. For his new Parisian audience, Rossini celebrates opera's eroticism with all the musical finesse at his disposal. But, just as he gives the impression of melody without memorable tunes, so he gives you sex without the sting. No one gets hurt. (No wonder Wagner cannot bear it.) Forgiving the Comte, Adele smuggles him out of the castle by a back way. The returning crusaders (who must have breached a fair number of castles themselves, in the holy land), will never know their own was infiltrated by alien males back home. The situation is saved by secrecy and silence; by "secret passages" in lives, and in castles.

For "cette nuit obscure" is also the human condition. Let serious opera explore its dangers and pain; le Comte Ory laughs at it. Rossini filters the danger through his own brand of sensuality. In life, he was not a serial adulterer with a dysfunctional marriage like Puccini; he was a gourmet who enjoyed his appetites, and life. He loved a joke; loved company, showing off, social sparkle. His ideal of sensuality ends happily and does no harm.

Like his opera.