Eroticism in Music

L. Macy , ‘Speaking of sex: Metaphor and performance in the Italian madrigal’, Journal of Musicology, 14 (1996), 1–34

Carmina burana, L'incoronazione di Poppea, Poppea, Tristan und Isolde, Tannhäuser, Rigoletto, La traviata, Carmen

The inherent irrationalism of music, its dependence on effective patterns of tension and release, pulse and rhythm, and its emphasis on emotion and feeling have always allowed it to give voice to the ebb and flow of human sexuality and its yearning for consummation in physical reality. The oldest extant erotic music is found in the works of the trouvères and the Minnesinger (the word itself literally means ‘singers of sexual love’) as well as in the earthiness of such manuscripts as Carmina burana, in which sexuality is extolled as a valid alternative to spiritual austerity.

Eroticism was a central subject for the 16th-century Italian and English madrigalists, who exploited the sexual conceits of contemporary poetry, with its metaphoric equation of ‘sighing’ and ‘dying’ with ecstasy and orgasm (see symbolism). It is with the emergence of opera, however, in which music is linked to individual psychology, that sexual expression begins to gain its greatest force. The final duet of Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea ( 1642 ), itself a study of the sexuality of power in which love is rendered redundant, forms an effective prototype for much erotic music in its reliance on closely entwined vocal lines and harmonies that arouse desire by repeatedly delaying melodic and harmonic resolution. The psychological bifurcation between desire and love, already present in Poppea, is integral to opera's exploration of the splits in the human psyche between subconscious thought and conscious action. Mozart's operas to librettos by Da Ponte examine attempts to constrain the irrationality of desire within the artificial boundaries of class and society. Monteverdi's methodology, meanwhile, is not in fact far removed from that of Wagner in Tristan und Isolde ( 1865 ), considered by many to be the most erotic work in musical history, in which tonality itself seems suspended in chromatic irresolution as the lovers strive for a level of erotic fulfilment that is impossible in life.

Conflicting sexual attitudes have frequently led to inherent musical or dramatic tensions. The 19th century, though it shirked pleasure, was obsessed by desire. Wagner , avoiding all depiction of physical sex, relentlessly balances eroticism with prudishness, most notably in Tannhäuser ( 1845 , rev. 1861 ), which also polarizes women as saints or demonic whores. Elsewhere in Wagner's output the expression of desire is equated with emotional or physical catastrophe. Many 19th-century works that dared to suggest or imply pleasurable sexual activity ( Verdi's Rigoletto and La traviata, Bizet's Carmen, for instance) met with a considerable outcry, and it is not untilStrauss's tone-poem Don Juan ( 1889 ) that an element of genuine hedonism, absent since Mozart , re-enters music. Strauss is the first composer to portray not only desire but also the sexual act itself, beginning with his opera Feuersnot ( 1901 ) and continuing with the Symphonia domestica ( 1902 – 3 ), Der Rosenkavalier ( 1911 ), and Arabella ( 1933 ).

Strauss's work also coincided with the Freudian revolution that constrained sexuality within the parameters of psychoanalytic pathology. The erotic and harmonic extremism of Salome ( 1905 ) and Elektra ( 1909 ) have been seen as a parallel development along similar lines, as have the operas of Franz Schreker and, most notably, the profound sexual expressionism of Berg's Lulu ( 1937 ), written after the Schoenbergian redefinition of tonality and depicting an incarnate sex goddess whose principal theme is the note row from which the musical structure of the entire work is derived. In France the heady sensuousness of Debussy , Ravel , and early Rousselretains the emphasis on sexual pleasure and hedonism. The radical re-evaluation of sexual attitudes in the second half of the 20th century brought with it a new sexual frankness, found in such works as Stockhausen's Stimmung ( 1968 ), Zimmermann's Die Soldaten ( 1965 ), and Ginastera's Bomarzo ( 1967 ), and witnessed the emergence of powerful trends in both feminist and gay musicology.

Carmina burana, L'incoronazione di Poppea, Poppea, Tristan und Isolde, Tannhäuser, Rigoletto, La traviata, Carmen
L. Macy , ‘Speaking of sex: Metaphor and performance in the Italian madrigal’, Journal of Musicology, 14 (1996), 1–34