One answer – perhaps an obvious one – struck me about fifteen years ago at a school fund-raising quiz night. A music question came first. The first line of a song was played, and the teams had to write down the next line from memory. With that first line – There she was just a-walking down the street – two hundred people jumped to their feet and sang rather than wrote the next line, waving their hands and stomping their feet: Singing do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do. Most of us hadn’t heard Manfred Mann for twenty years, but still remembered the entire song, syllable perfect. I’ve written about the mnemonic tricks and uses of poetry in a previous essay (the 2002 Judith Wright Memorial Lecture) but, at the risk of repeating myself (which is no risk at all, but rather an excuse for reinforcement) my argument was this: why does poetry stick in our heads? Why do we struggle to remember phone numbers when poems can always be remembered and recalled, with reasonable accuracy, a few minutes later?

There are good evolutionary reasons for this. In a preliterate society, all the knowledge that was crucial to survival – geographical, sacred, moral, medical, nutritional – had to be remembered and passed on from mouth to ear. Over a million years or so, the evolving human brain therefore developed various tricks to help remember words, setting them to music (or to poetry, rhyme, rhythm or assonance) among them. Life, a Users’ Oral? In her book Aboriginal Music: Education for Living (1985), the ethnomusicologist Catherine Ellis tells of asking an Aboriginal woman at the end of a recording session if she knows the number to ring for a taxi. The woman immediately sings a commercial jingle that includes a phone number for a taxi company. Perhaps our phone numbers might stick more easily if we sang them to their own eight-note tone-dialling melodies. We use sing-song chants, after all, to remember our times tables at school. One two is two, two twos are four.

The first musical instrument was, of course, the human voice, the only pitched instrument for most of human music-making. In Australia before European contact, music was primarily vocal, accompanied by clapping or clapsticks. The didgeridoo, a pitched instrument, only occurred in a narrow band of the tropical north. This musical divide between the north and south is also a divide in the history of music. Music couldn’t begin removing itself from the embrace of words until the first didgeridoo or bone flute. Only then could it head off into the realm of abstract art to become what Les Murray, in his ‘Barcaldine Suite’, has called ‘the vast nonsense poem’ – although it keeps reconnecting to the meaning and sense of words throughout the history of song.

Of course, music is more than an aide-mémoire for hunter–gatherer survival information. Music, like poetry, is a powerful social adhesive in itself; it provides entertainment and emotional release, and it marks rites of passage. But, perhaps above all, it has great sacramental and revelatory power.

Mass, in a great medieval cathedral, was surely the first (mass) multimedia experience, encompassing many senses simultaneously – if not necessarily the logical mind: ‘Music is the vast nonsense poem / Our precisions float out on with emotion / To change and get poignant as they drown.’ To a medieval and (later) renaissance congregation, the seismic organ tones, Latin plainsong, and luminous stained glass narratives must have seemed like Close Encounters of the Divine Kind. Who needed the sense and ‘precisions’ of vernacular words?

Which brings me to Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), in many ways the first modern composer, and one of the great composers of sacred music.

Opera

By Monteverdi’s time – which was also Shakespeare’s – the entrenched musical style was polyphony. Words had been subsumed by music; we were well into the realm of ‘the great nonsense poem’. Looking back from the end of the eighteenth century, Charles Burney, in his General History of Music (1776–89), wrote of the dominant madrigal style that the lyrics were ‘utterly unintelligible’ and that ‘the contrapuntists had abused their art, to the ruin of lyric poetry’ producing music which was ‘utterly dry, fanciless, and despicable’. An exaggeration, but this is the era of Monteverdi, or an era that is ready for a Monteverdi, and the re-emergence of the singing voice – of sung, intelligible meaning – from the polyphonic styles.

The achievements of Monteverdi – and his predecessors Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini – owe much to the salons of certain Florentine nobles, in which groups of poets and musicians arrived at a kind of manifesto for the liberation of song – of a single melodic line, supported on pillars of harmony. Monteverdi was a wonderful composer of madrigals, also, but from these experiments, and from the dramatic effects that arias and duets made possible, opera was born, and with it, necessarily, recitative, a form of singing in which words had probably not been as intelligible since the clapstick and chant of hunter–gatherers.

I like to think of opera as the second multimedia experience, but its trajectory has been in a relentlessly secular direction, even if, in some senses, it has become a secular substitute for religion. If the worship of art has become our last refuge from a post-Nietzschean nihilism, then opera, in particular, has surely become its High Mass. (Nietzsche, a good amateur pianist and composer of ‘the blackest of raven-black’ songs, believed that music could offer the most authentic Dionysian experience, a metaphysics in itself.)

The beginnings of opera, though, lay in popular entertainment. On most lists of Top Ten operas, four would be works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91), including three he wrote with Lorenzo da Ponte (1749–1838): Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte. It warms my librettist’s jealous heart that these are known as the Da Ponte operas. Lorenzo ended up as an unmagnificent failed grocer in New Jersey; he needs every fifteen-minute helping of fame he can get.

Why do these operas remain such favourites? The music, of course. But we can love the music of opera while resisting the drama. Most operas, especially Italian ones, once seemed to me to be collections of Good Bits or ‘lyric interruptions’, joined together by absurd recitative. The glacial pace and ridiculous twists of the plots seemed to come straight out of daytime television, with characters from Jerry Springer Central Casting (or in the case of Wagner, from Star Wars via J.R.R. Tolkien). And as for the frocks!

But a love of opera can be more than just tongue-in-cheek. Roland Barthes’ feelings on the subject are close to mine: ‘I recently saw Gluck’s Orpheus, and aside from the wonderful music, it really was a silly thing to watch, an unconscious parody of its own genre, but not only did this element of kitsch fail to upset me, it positively entertained me. I enjoyed the double truth of both the spectacle and its parody.’ Having your ironic cake and eating it is very much the postmodern position, but Mozart was well ahead of that game. At the risk of making the past suck up to the present, I would cite him as the first postmodern composer. Even at his most profound, Mozart is incapable of being sententious or kitsch. There is always that very bearable lightness of being, that feeling of space and air – in the music, anyway. What of the words?

The darkest of Mozart’s operas is the second Da Ponte opera, Don Giovanni, but it is not as dark as it is sometimes played. Don Giovanni is one of those operas that non-Italian speakers can understand even without subtitles; it is mostly obvious what is happening, and if not, the horse of the music carries us cleanly over the hurdle. So might Leporello or the Don just as well be singing do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do? Not quite. We would miss something without Da Ponte’s text, and that something is a mix of lightness and darkness that parallels Mozart’s. Now I’m not claiming for one minute that Da Ponte is Mozart’s equal. (Mozart has no equal – except perhaps Shakespeare, and one of my favourite what-ifs is to imagine a musical marriage between the early Shakespeare of The Comedy of Errors, with the Mozart made forever young by death.) But Da Ponte does provide a wonderful foil to Mozart. Don Giovanni has its logical non sequiturs and, like all pre-Wagner opera, is still an opera of recitative and action, with ‘lyric interruptions’. But there is a deftness in the libretto that at least echoes Mozart’s deftness, even if the music was an echo to the words in terms of the chronology of writing. The darkness of the Commendatore’s murder is followed almost immediately by what the critic David Littlejohn calls Leporello’s ‘Goon Show’ question: ‘Which one is dead? You or the old man?’ That line would never have got past Wagner or Puccini, but you sense that Wolfie revelled in it. The opera opens and closes on what I would call (more anachronism notwithstanding) a larrikin tone. Littlejohn closes his terrific essay ‘Don Giovanni: The Impossible Opera’ (found in The Art of Opera, 1994) with these words: ‘What we may be up against is a composer who was far less troubled by all these “irreconcilables” than we are – provided he could contain them in music that seemed to him all of one piece.’

This is a music that can contain anything, and perhaps never more representatively than in the famous catalogue aria from Don Giovanni, in which Leporello is singing of his master’s sexual conquests: a long list of blondes and brunettes and tall ones and thin ones and Italian and German and Spanish ones. This could be done in a fast patter at Cole Porter speed, but Mozart sets the hilariously rhymed words to a music that is as intense and dramatic as the Requiem, while at the same time continually undercutting its own drama, and underlining its melodrama.

Which brings me to Gilbert and Sullivan.

Learning by Heart

To repeat: the human brain evolved a capacity for music to help it to remember language, but music, the great nonsense poem, evolved its own separate powers, especially its power to move us without a word within earshot. To move us and to startle us, especially ’round midnight. Nietzsche again, from Daybreak: ‘The ear, the organ of fear, could have evolved as greatly as it has only in the night and twilight of obscure caves and woods, in accordance with the mode of life in the age of timidity, that is to say the longest human age there has ever been: in bright daylight the ear is less necessary. That is how music acquired the character of an art of night and twilight.’

A list of 100 ‘Greatest’ Rock ’n’ Roll Hits was published some years ago in the local paper. I counted eighty-odd songs that I could still sing, and more than a few whose lyrics I could probably recite, rhyme-perfect, given time. A waste of useful brain-space? No wonder names and telephone numbers fail to appear when summoned. Too many gigabytes of precious (and shrinking) memory have been occupied for thirty years with the lyrics of ‘My Generation’ and ‘Wild Thing’ and other information crucial to personal survival, and the survival of the tribe.

How fitting that we say we remember things ‘by heart’. Of course we remember things by brain, but music, which might not be all heart, is mostly heart, and its power to move us certainly adds to its memorability. These rock songs were first given to me in adolescence, and surely the raging emotions of the music, and the raging nights and twilights of puberty (‘Satisfaction’, ‘Ball and Chain’) joined forces to fix the lyrics in my brain indelibly.

There is often also a raging thirst for the spiritual in adolescence. How else to explain an appetite – in my adolescence and many others – for the yearning, bogus novels of Hermann Hesse? One advantage of music over literature: it can get away with bogus yearning, because music has the power to transcend the bogus. Most of us probably have a rough idea of the poetry and music we want (or are going to get) at our funerals, because of that power to transcend the everyday, to create states of meditative and contemplative being in us. Memo to the ABC: an idea for a compilation disc – Music To Die By. The adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony was played at Don Dunstan’s memorial service. Until then, I had hankered after it for my own funeral, but, with visions of Dirk Bogarde’s mascara running down his face in Death in Venice, I now might settle for the Rolling Stones.

Or for Gilbert and Sullivan. A few weeks ago I went to the first production of Pirates of Penzance I had seen for thirty years. The dialogue, apart from a few memorable jokes, I had forgotten – but I knew the entire sung libretto by heart. This music, also, was given to me in adolescence – if a little earlier in the evening than ’round midnight.

W.S. Gilbert (1836–1911) and Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900), even at their most emotional, always have two larrikin tongues fixed firmly in their cheeks; they are the very model of a postmodern Barthes. If, in the Da Ponte operas, Mozart is always one step ahead of his librettist, Sullivan is never more than a half step behind Gilbert’s light and witty lyrics. When the music does tread heavily, it is usually a parody of Giuseppe Verdi or Richard Wagner, and a double pleasure.

As far as I know, G & S is the only joint venture in which the librettist receives top billing. This might well be alphabetical (I’m always amused by the way Woody Allen lists the stars of his movies in strict alphabetical order, with – surprise, surprise – his name first), but it’s more likely due to the fact that Gilbert was the producer as well as the writer of the Savoy operas, and could bill himself anywhere he liked.

I’ll have more to say about Gilbert’s lasting influence later – especially on society verse, and Tin Pan Alley – but first, a detour back into High Seriousness, and Music To Die By. A year after Gilbert & Sullivan’s first collaboration, the one-man team of Wagner & Wagner saw the first complete performance of his Ring Cycle, before two emperors and a king. G & S overlapped the years between Wagner (1813–83), a generation older, and his finest successor, Richard Strauss (1864–1949), a generation younger. G & S never worked together again after a bitter dispute over the price of a new carpet in the Savoy theatre – a subject which would have made a fine light opera in itself.

Nietzsche and Tolstoy are perhaps the most famous critics of Wagner, if from completely opposite directions. After being an early acolyte, Nietzsche broke with Wagner ferociously, believing his former mentor had diluted his Dionysian amor fati with pathetic Christian notions of redemption. (I like to think that the warning signs of this dispute, writ ridiculously small, can be seen in a letter that Wagner wrote to Nietzsche’s doctor suggesting that Nietzsche’s chronic ill-health was due to too much masturbation.)

The more puritanical Tolstoy saw opera, in general, as rather silly, and Wagner, in particular, as ‘a narrow-minded, self-assured German of bad taste and bad style, who has a most false conception of poetry’. There is a well-known scene in War and Peace (1869) in which Tolstoy puts his opinion of a ludicrous Bellini-like opera into Natasha’s mouth, an opinion that lacks any Barthesian sense of a ‘double-truth’ enjoyment of kitsch, or high campery. Tolstoy put his opinions into his own mouth in a famous treatise What Is Art? (1898), in which a Plato-like suspicion of opera’s ability to seduce the senses and render rational thought impossible is uppermost. ‘Sit in the dark for four days with people who are not quite sane, and through the auditory nerves subject your brain to the strongest action of the sounds best adapted to excite it, and you will no doubt be reduced to an abnormal condition and enchanted by absurdities.’ Later on, this: ‘I could stand no more of it and escaped from the theatre with a feeling of revulsion which even now I cannot forget.’

Would a better libretto have helped Tolstoy to ‘get’ Wagner? King Ludwig II gave performances of Wagner’s libretti alone, but he was certifiably barking mad, possibly because he had spent considerably more than four days in a darkened theatre. Wagner’s libretti demand a very large suspension of disbelief, but if you are a Wagnerite (like me), the music carries all before it, if not quite as Nietzsche hoped. And if you are a Wagnerphobe, like Tolstoy, no improvement in the text could possibly help.

It is a great irony that, in Wagner, who took the ideas of Peri and Monteverdi to their logical end point – a music drama in which all the elements are fused into a seamless whole – and who wrote that music ‘was an end not a means’ – it is the music that is finally dominant, an absolute means to itself. This Tolstoyan debate over the intoxications of music versus reason reaches an interesting nexus in Strauss’s last opera, Capriccio.

Passion versus Reason

Richard Strauss was possibly the greatest orchestrator in musical history; the textures of his scores are bewitching and seamless. He set vocal lines so effortlessly that he would sometimes set the stage directions his librettists sent by mistake. Strauss wrote six operas in collaboration with Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929), a collaboration that was done by correspondence, which at first might seem the best way to avoid arguing over carpet costs. There are five hundred of these letters, and they make for riveting reading. Hofmannsthal, a patrician, reserved man of letters, and Strauss, an extroverted, crowd-pleasing, bourgeois gentilhomme, could never have got on personally. In fact, when Strauss threatened to visit his librettist while working in Vienna, Hofmannsthal wrote: ‘It is most kind of you to offer to come out here, but please don’t think of it under any circumstances; the tram journey of one and three quarter hours each way is torture, and I do not enjoy visitors.’

Strauss, at the time, was in town as co-director of the State Opera, an appointment that Hofmannsthal strenuously opposed, even writing a letter to the effect that the composer’s ego was too large and that his music somehow seemed better and more civilised than Strauss was himself. When they were working together, at a distance, the letters would follow a pattern of beginning with fake praise and little self-deprecations – ‘Of course, I know nothing of music, but ...’; ‘Of course, we musicians have no taste, but …’ – before the knives came out, especially Hofmannsthal’s, when Strauss runs his plot ideas past him. ‘This strikes me, forgive my plain speaking, as odious ...’ and ‘I feel quite faint’ and ‘… rubbish ... nonsense … a stylistic absurdity … truly horrid’.

Littlejohn’s amusing essay ‘Herr von Words and Doctor Music’ gives an extended account of this and of Hofmannsthal’s certainty that the lasting success of their collaboration would be due to his influence – to his education of the intellectually unsophisticated Strauss. ‘You have every reason to be grateful to me for bringing you … that element which is sure to bewilder people and to provoke a certain amount of antagonism … This “incomprehensibility” is a mortgage to be redeemed by the next generation.’

After Hofmannsthal’s death, Strauss worked with, among others, the Jewish writer Stefan Zweig (1881–1942). This was in the 1930s, in Nazi Germany. Strauss welcomed the Nazis at first, although he had no time for their anti-Semitism. And he was too much the cynic to be a True Believer. He was too much of a cynic to believe in anything much – except for music, and the home comforts of his own suburban domestic symphony. He was in total accord with the Nazis’ massive patronage to ‘uplift’ German art, however. And here, perhaps, is the fulcrum of the problem: his elevation of the artistic above the human. Which is ironic, given that von Hofmannsthal had renounced poetry at age twenty-six to work only in the theatre, which he felt had more potential to influence politics.

The Nazis, concerned by the flight of prominent figures into exile, were anxious to secure Strauss’s backing. He, in turn, supported Goebbels’ attack on the ‘decadent’ Paul Hindemith. Strauss signed a petition vilifying Thomas Mann. Et cetera. Later, he claimed that he complied with the régime only in order to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law Alice and his grandchildren. It is something of a miracle that Alice was able to remain safely in his household. There was also, no doubt, an element of naïveté in Strauss. As George S. Marek has written in his biography: ‘Strauss was not a Nazi. He was one of those who let it happen ... He was one of those who thought they were more bark than bite, that the weight and inertia of actual government would temper their outrageous program.’

The composition of Capriccio is itself a metaphor for Strauss’s difficult position at the time. The idea for the libretto came from Zweig. The composer had developed a great liking for the younger writer, although the Nazi officials banned their first collaboration, Die schweigsame Frau, after two performances because of its Jewish librettist. Zweig could see the writing on the wall. Against Strauss’s urging, but hounded from his Salzburg home, his books publicly burnt, Zweig left Austria for England, then after war broke out, for South America. ‘I almost envy the racially persecuted Stefan Zweig,’ Strauss wrote, in an astonishingly naïve journal entry, ‘who now refuses definitely to work for me, either openly or secretly. He wants no special favours from the Third Reich. I must confess I do not understand this Jewish solidarity and I regret that the artist in Zweig is unable to rise above political vagaries.’

Political vagaries?

In a letter of 17 June 1935, Strauss wrote to Zweig pouring scorn on the Nazis’ ideas of music: ‘For me there are only two categories of people. Those who have talent, and those who have not.’ He goes on to thank the poet for the idea for Capriccio, and refuses to work with anyone but Zweig on the libretto. This letter was intercepted by the Gestapo, and a copy was forwarded to Adolf Hitler. Five days later, Strauss was visited by various heavies and advised to resign from the Reichsmusikkamer for reasons of health. He then wrote a truly grovelling letter to Hitler, concluding:

Mein Führer! My whole life belongs to German music and to an indefatigable effort to elevate German culture. I have never been active politically or even expressed myself in politics. Therefore I believe I will find understanding from you, the great architect of German social life ... Confident of your high sense of justice, I beg you, my Führer, most humbly, to receive me for a personal discussion ... I remain, most honoured Herr ReichsKanzler, with the expression of my high esteem,

Yours, forever devotedly, Richard Strauss.

The stakes were high – life or death for Strauss’s daughter-in-law. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about this letter is that most of us are capable of writing something similar, in similar circumstances.

The libretto for Capriccio, begun by a Jew, was completed by the loyal Nazi supporter Clemens Krauss and was first performed in 1942, a few months after the exiled Zweig killed himself in Brazil, along with his second wife, Lotte. The centrepiece of the opera is the debate between words and music over which has the greater power. There seems a strange irony here – a metaphor for the debate between Strauss and Zweig – but, more importantly, for the debate between passion (music) and reason (words), a debate that was lost by reason in Germany many years before.

The Platonic basis of Tolstoy’s attacks on Wagner reappeared in broader, more forceful forms after the war: in ‘anti-art’ art that wanted to dispense with rhetoric and metaphor and cheap emotional thrills and in attacks on the old faith in the civilising power of art. ‘We now know,’ George Steiner summed it up, ‘that it is possible that a man can read Goethe and Schiller in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work in Auschwitz in the morning.’

But perhaps we can insert a qualifier. Music, most passionate of the arts, may fog our rational brains, but we can still believe in the moral power of words. If the novel, say, is about nothing else, it is about the imaginative entering of other minds, other ideas, other perspectives, it is about complexities that are far from the beautiful simplicities of romantic music. It might be possible to listen to Schubert and work in a gas chamber, but I am reluctant to believe it is possible to read the writing of Primo Levi, say, and do the same.

My first novel, Maestro (1989), aimed to dramatise these conflicts and to make them plausible through the lens of a naïve adolescent narrator. Wagner’s heroes had no plausibility in themselves, Nietzsche once complained, but must be translated ‘into reality, into the modern, into – let us be even crueller – the bourgeois!’ Well, that’s fine by me. My chosen bourgeois in this case were an Australian family, and a fictional Viennese refugee and pianist, Eduard Keller. ‘If you want people to believe your lies,’ Keller tells his student in a pivotal line in the novel, ‘set them to music.’ The philosophical roots of that novel go back to Plato, who – Taliban-like – wanted to ban poets (which for him meant lyric poets, that is, musician–poets with lyres) from his ideal republic for similar reasons, among others.

Tin Pan Alley

The American poet Brad Leithauser believes that the lyrics of Tin Pan Alley constitute one of the great traditions of American poetry and one that has been largely ignored by the wider, or perhaps narrower, literary world.

And within Tin Pan Alley itself? As in the world of opera, the lyricist usually plays second fiddle, so to speak, to the composer. The Gershwin brothers embodied this asymmetry in many ways. George (1898–1937) was an extroverted ladykiller, taller and handsomer than his brother Ira (1896–1983). George had affairs with French countesses and actresses. He also made ‘a good career move’, at least in terms of romantic myth, by dying young. Gershwin means, simply, George – and I don’t want to take away from his genius, which is enormous. But let’s not forget Ira, his shorter, square-headed, more scholarly older brother, who was married to the same woman all his life. ‘I’m biding my time / Cause that’s the kind of guy I’m.’ Does this famous couplet need the eye as well as the ear to notice that it is cleverly semi-palindromic, beginning and ending with ‘I’m’? Only the ear is needed to hear how it also bides its musical time in the drawn-out three-note ‘I’m’. This is not just clever writing, it is brilliantly matched to the music, and in a way that owes much to G & S. As Philip Furia, in his terrific book Poets of Tin Pan Alley (1990), points out, Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart and many other Tin Pan Alley wordsmiths saw themselves as successors to W.S. Gilbert. ‘Yip’ Harburg, who was to write the lyrics for The Wizard of Oz, went to the same high school as Ira, and both were big fans of the brilliant patter and playfulness of Gilbert’s lyrics. In fact, Harburg thought that Gilbert’s song lyrics were, simply, poetry – he didn’t know that Sullivan existed until Ira told him.

Furia offers a succinct history of the origins of Tin Pan Alley in Jewish immigrant ballads and in the handful of black songwriters who fused those sentimental ballads with what were known as ‘coon’ songs – previously white versions of Negro spirituals and gospel. One of these, Rosamund Johnson, wrote of his plan to ‘clean up the caricature’ and express sentimental feelings in ‘phrases universal enough to meet the genteel demands of middle-class America’.

The arrival of ragtime allowed the music to syncopate or ‘rag’ the lyric, and lay the foundations not just for the rhymes of Gershwin, Porter et al., but of jazz singing in general. The songwriter who many believe the greatest of them all, Irving Berlin, wrote the most famous ragtime song of the era, ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’. It was into this spicy melting pot that P.G. Wodehouse arrived from England to work – the first lyricist who preferred to hear the music first and then set the lyrics to the music: to me a much more formidable task. But unlike Furia, I haven’t time to begin at the beginning, so I’m going to begin at the Beguine, with the representative figure of the Golden Age that followed, Cole Porter (1891–1964).

First though, back to ‘Ol’ Man River’. Showboat was seen by Hammerstein as an answer to the urbane and witty lyrics of Hart and Gershwin – and Porter – that were so popular at the time. The Gilbertian tradition, if you like. Broadway shows of the era were little more than contrived vehicles for hit songs – ‘lyric interruptions’ again – which could be inserted into one show, and then into another, often serially. ‘The field of libretto writing,’ Hammerstein wrote, ‘was therefore filled with hacks and gag men.’

Hammerstein wanted a more integrated musical in the tradition of European operetta, rather than G & S. Gilbert can write a banal love lyric (‘A wandering minstrel I’), but it is always tongue-in-cheek. With Hammerstein, it is not. That is, Gilbert aims to have his ironic cake and eat it emotionally, in a fashion that Barthes would approve; but Hammerstein wants us to surrender to the schmaltz, to the pure emotion unpolluted by irony. We can do that with ‘Ol’ Man River’, and nearly all the way with ‘Some Enchanted Evening’. Hammerstein also attacked the tyranny of the rhyme, and its endless pattering wit. While admiring the brilliance of Hart’s lyrics, he wrote, ‘if a listener is made rhyme-conscious, his interest may be diverted from the story of the song’. He points out that the first rhyme in ‘Ol’ Man River’ comes after ten lines – cotton/forgotten. It’s a supreme irony then that what is surely Hammerstein’s best known couplet is a rhyme: ‘I am calling you / oo-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo.’

Both these strains – the sophisticated rhyming patter-song, and the sentimental ballad – competed within the mind of Porter, a Yale-graduated Midwesterner working among mostly Jewish immigrant songwriters. His early society verses were largely witty, rhyming catalogues, but he longed to write a Tin Pan Alley ‘sob-ballad’. In 1927 he remarked to the young Richard Rodgers that he had at last found the secret of writing such hits. ‘As I listened breathlessly for the magic formula,’ Rodgers recalled, Porter whispered in his ear that the secret was ‘to write Jewish tunes’.

This led to Porter’s shift away from the sophisticated lyrics and simpler music of his catalogue, or list, songs (‘Anything Goes’, ‘You’re the Top’, ‘Let’s Do It’, ‘It’s De-Lovely’) towards a more complex, powerful and heavily chromatic musical style – often with banal lyrics. ‘Night and Day’ is a key example, but his first successful hit of this type, ‘Old-Fashioned Garden’, contained such lines as these: ‘One summer day I chanced to stray / to a garden of flow’ry blooming wild / It took me back to the days of yore / And a spot that I loved as a child.’

‘It is surely one of the ironies of the musical theatre that the one who has written the most enduring “Jewish” music should be an Episcopalian millionaire from … Indiana,’ Rodgers later wrote. A paradox perhaps, but an even greater one is the power of Porter’s darker, minor-key songs (Nietzsche’s ‘art of night and twilight’?) to override the banality of their lyrics and to rejuvenate the clichés – as did Wagner’s music, on its much broader canvas, with a different, more mythic set of clichés.

If you want people to believe your clichés, set them to song?

Poetry Fights Back

‘How far can music be mated to poetry without damage to one or the other?’ Neville Cardus asked in his essay ‘Words and Music’. W.H. Auden – who wrote lyrics for both Igor Stravinsky and Benjamin Britten – once said that ‘words for a composer are like troops for a Chinese general’. Here is Britten, from the other side of the fence: ‘Opera composers have a reputation for ruthless disregard of poetic values … all they need is a hack to bully, and serious poets won’t stand for that …’

Nor will serious poetry, which usually aims for a word-perfect state that is beyond editing, pruning or tampering. It is a commonplace that great books often make bad films, and less than great books often make great movies (The Godfather springs to mind). Do banal lyrics make the best songs? Even Schubert often set banal poetry, although perhaps emphasis in the search for a lyric should be on simplicity rather than banality. The best song lyrics have a purity and clarity in their lyrics, even if that can sometimes sound a little banal when merely spoken. Britten again: ‘To be suitable for music, poetry must be simple, succinct, and crystal clear.’

Certainly, there are difficulties in setting great poetry. One problem: if composers are too enamoured by, or too reverential towards, the poetry – if they are not, in short, enough of the Chinese general – the poetry will obstruct the flow of the music.

Another problem: great poetry can be difficult to sing. Britten again: ‘the bad enunciation of many singers doesn’t seem to provide a suitable showplace for a poet’s finest thoughts.’ The Auden poetry that Britten set – ‘Hymns to St Cecilia’, for instance – was not necessarily the best of Auden. It is difficult to imagine a setting of Auden’s ‘Lullaby’ that could improve on the music of the words. Britten also set some of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s most musical poems — a brave, perhaps reckless, choice. A composer would seem to have everything to lose, and not much to gain, in setting ‘Heaven’s Haven’ or ‘God’s Grandeur’.

The music in Britten’s cycle of these poems – A.D.M.G. – is wonderful, but the poetry is largely drowned, despite the composer’s sensitive ear for language. A.D.M.G. – Ad majorem Dei gloriam; To the greater glory of God. Like Hopkins, Les Murray dedicates his books to the glory of God. Murray likes to spread the myth that he is tone-deaf, but anyone listening to his poetry knows otherwise. There are many kinds of music to be heard in poetry, the alliterations and internal rhymes and sprung rhythms of Hopkins among them. But Murray is especially good at mimicking what we might call the natural music of the world in words, or those ‘ambient sounds that music has dipped up / in its silver ladle’. To show what words can do without music – or without a tape recorder out in the world – speak aloud to a few more musical bars from ‘The Barcaldine Suite’: ‘the huge bulk gamelan / as hardwood logs collaborate into a keen sawmill.’ Or this longer song from Murray’s ‘Bats’ Ultrasound’, an atonal music that is half fingernails on blackboard, half alien-speak pitched just beyond the range of the human ear:

… Where they flutter at evening’s a queer
Tonal hunting zone above highest C.
Insect prey at the peak of our hearing
Drone re to their detailing tee:

ah, eyrie-ire, aero hour, eh?
O’er our ur-area (our era aye
ere your raw row) we air our array,
err, yaw, row wry – aura our orrery,
our eerie ü our ray, our arrow.

A rare ear, our aery Yawhweh.

On Reading a Song

Is the need for a dose of banality (or at least simplicity) in song lyrics now offset by the extra literary dimension – and the extra comprehension time – that surtitles bring to the multi-medium of opera? Might a writer get away with more complex lyrics because they can be read as well as heard? I found watching the surtitles for Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (the Richard Mills opera for which I adapted a libretto from Ray Lawler’s classic play) deeply disconcerting. Individual lines stuck up on the screen often seemed too exposed, too lonely. Comic lines met with a different fate. Half the audience would laugh at the written line on the surtitle; a moment later the other half would laugh at the sung joke – a halving of effect that I found unsettling.

It needs to be said that reducing a libretto to surtitles is a whole new translation process. For one thing, repetitions don’t usually appear. The use of italics and non-italics to indicate dialogue, or different voices singing simultaneously, also creates difficulties. Above all, the glancing human eye can only take so much in. Surtitles, like text messages, are bite-size packages of usually no more than eighty-odd letters. But I still think this haiku-like form might offer an extra dimension, especially for a more deliberately literary libretto, such as the second opera I wrote with Mills, Batavia. I chose to use early seventeenth-century verse forms and diction as models for this – late-Shakespeare, King James Bible, John Donne, early Milton. ‘The singer has only one weapon against a polyphonic and indiscreet orchestra,’ Richard Strauss once wrote, ‘the consonant.’ He means hard consonants, with long vowels between. I had this in mind, when I wrote these lines for the libretto for Batavia: ‘There is no God and if there be / A soul within the body’s cloth / The moth of death eats both.’

A nice line in tongue-twisting poetry, but could it be sung? It could certainly be illuminated on a surtitle screen, and I liked seeing it up there in lights so much that I can’t quite remember the singing. But Shakespeare’s plays are full of such songs. And after the Doll, in which Strine was sung in an opera house for the first time, as far as I know, I’ve come to think that anything can be sung.

When playing around with this period language, I remembered something Arthur Miller said of The Crucible: ‘The problem was not to try to imitate the archaic speech but to try to create a new echo of it that would flow freely off American tongues.’ I wanted a version of Jacobean English that could be sung by modern singers. In fact, it might be argued that sung English allows much more artifice than spoken English: its syllabic formality permits the librettist to write almost anything. And although the jury is still out, I hope that the surtitle screen will add a dimension to the pleasure of opera.

Snoop Doggy Dogg for Laureate?

Hip hop is a mix of artforms – or a remix, to use the jargon – that includes rap poetry, emceeing (with those itchy-scratchy turntables), graffiti art and a dress code of mismatched and outsized clothes (a code with ghetto origins in the remix of shoplifted or smash-and-grabbed clothing). The music is also often stolen, deliberately using quotations that can range from the classics to jazz and pop, in a process called sampling. Sampling often provides the main melodies – the main pitched music – in rap.

The reputation of Puff Daddy – aka Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs, aka P. Diddy – has been on the skids for four or five years. He’s seen as being not much more than a ‘sampler’, an interesting term of abuse in a world that depends so much on sampling. I stuck his name in the title of this essay mainly because Puff Daddy is roughly euphonious with Monteverdi, and I thought it might make a sweet rap couplet. Puff Daddy himself is not much of a rhymester. He’s better known for hanging out with J. Lo, for being seen in the vicinity of various murder scenes, for allegedly using the reputation of murdered friends such as Notorious B.I.G. – aka Biggie Smalls – to enhance his own, and for frequently changing his name with great ceremony: ‘Just some ghetto boys / Living in the ghetto streets / and everyday they gotta fight to stay alive / It’s just reality.’ I don’t know if Puff Daddy sang that at his $600,000 birthday party. With such friends of the ghetto as Donald Trump on his guest-list, Puff Daddy reminds me of Elvis Costello’s line about John Lennon: ‘Was it a millionaire who wrote the line “Imagine there’s no money ...”’ But there is poetry in hip hop, and it is the most widely heard poetry in the world today. It is also the one form of song in which the text is again paramount.

Of course, most of those texts are utterly banal. It could also be argued that occasionally that banality is the banality of evil. It takes time for an old dog like me to learn the tricks of hip hop, especially an old white Doggy Dogg confronted by Gangsta-rap’s repulsive celebration of violence, its homophobia and its contempt for women. Is shouting brutal poetry a safer outlet for young male aggression than brutal bashings and shootings? Or does it just breed more violence, creating a worldwide adolescent culture of swagger and braggadocio, in which it can be a capital, or at best corporal, offence to lose face or be ‘dissed’? It’s very much a childish schoolyard world of tough-guy attitudes and competitive fighting and fucking. I have no doubt that adolescence has become more physically dangerous because of those aspects of hip hop culture.

That’s the bad news. Now for the good. Rap rhythms have always infused Black America, in gospel, in rhythm ’n’ blues, in the Jazz Poets, in the ad-libbed chants of black preachers, in the poems of possibly the first superstar rapper, Muhammad ‘float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’ Ali. Rap proper got started in the South Bronx when a Jamaican called D.J. Cool fused the improvised ‘toasting’ of his native Caribbean with these Black North American traditions. And it’s in improvisation that the best rap is still found, particularly in the ‘freestyle’ contests where rappers stand toe-to-toe trading rhymed insults of immense verbal dexterity, panache and sublimated violence. The world’s most successful rapper of recent years – Eminem – is the odd-whiteman-out, but he’s very good at improvising, as the unscripted climactic rhyme-battle in his film vehicle 8 Mile shows. The best film introduction to this world, though, is the documentary Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme by director Kevin Fitzgerald (aka D.J. Organic). After a drive-by history of rap, it culminates in a face-off between two of the best black exponents of the art: New York’s Supernatural and Chicago’s Juice. Juice rhymes so fluently that he is accused of being a ‘writer’, a performer who writes his lyrics in advance, which is the ultimate insult in this milieu. An even more amusing moment in the documentary comes when Supernatural lets slip that he regularly swots The Complete Rhyming Dictionary in preparation for his gladiatorial bouts.

There’s something Elizabethan in these contests of wordplay, a connection that Baz Luhrmann found in his version of Romeo and Juliet, in which Mercutio is portrayed as a proto-rapper. I have talked of matching early Shakespeare with Mozart, but a play such as The Comedy of Errors clearly offers scope for improvised slanging matches of great verbal dexterity – and perhaps demands them.

I first began playing around with rap lyrics by writing parodies. The refrain of my first attempt – ‘Give me back my jism, bitch!’ – seemed to sum up the misogyny of the genre. A quiche-eater fights back?

Of course, parodies are also a form of homage, and soon mine became a method of study also – a method of learning. Perhaps the emotional range of rap poetry will always be narrow. That powerful allegro-pulse, a heart-rate in a state of agitation, is fine for expressing anger, desire, jealousy, contempt – the red-hot emotions – but what about more meditative states of mind? What about romantic as against purely sexual love? The beat thumps itself too fiercely against the eardrum, Nietzsche’s ‘organ of fear’. The idea of a rap ballad will remain to me a contradiction in terms – until the first fast rap ballad comes along and contradicts me.

What am I doing at fifty-something writing rap lyrics? Sampling? Or just being a try-hard, as my children might tell me – one of their ultimate insults? Their generation has good reason to keep hip hop out of the hands of mine – just as I needed to keep ‘My Generation’ and ‘Satisfaction’ out of the hands of my parents. Having your rebellious art appropriated by parents must seem even worse than having it commercialised. Repressive tolerance, Adorno named the process. It would be even more difficult for kids to take Puff Daddy seriously if I was on his party list along with Donald Trump and who knows who else. Donald Rumsfeld? Barry Manilow? So there are risks, but I want to try-hard to finish this essay where I began – in the rhythmic and rhymed poetic voice, with an unpitched accompaniment. Yes, I am a writer and a sampler – two strikes against me already. But I hope that a couple of, well, couplets might stick in the head of any reader who has lasted this far, remembered by heart even without a heart-stirring melody to help engrave them. For rap is the librettist’s ultimate revenge: we always knew we could get rid of pitched instruments altogether, even the oldest of them all, the singing human larynx.

Drumkit:
(Sex ism, sex isn’t
Sex ism, sex isn’t … etc)

I have a plank for your chasm
I have plasm for your spasm
If you bring the eggs
I’ll supply the jism
If you brings the orgs
I’ve got the asm

(Sex ism, sex isn’t
Sex ism, sex isn’t …)

I’ll put a rainbow in your prism
Protoplasm in your schism
If you bring your icon
I’ll supply the clasm
If you bring your pussy
I’ll give that cat-a-clysm

(Sex ism, Sex isn’t
Sex ism, Sex isn’t …)

When I have a paroxysm
You’ll need an exorcism
If you bring the ego
I’ll add a little tism
But you can bring the sado
And the masochism.

(from Hip Hopera)

There are various metaphors in there for the marriage – or erotic relationship – between words and music, between poets and composers, but I’m not quite sure who is addressing whom. I’m also not quite sure that in trying to have my hip hop cake ironically and eat it straight, I’m merely having my cake, and throwing it up over myself. But that seems to be part of the art.

This is an edited version of the La Trobe University/Australian Book Review Annual Lecture, which Peter Goldsworthy delivered at the State Library of South Australia on 8 December 2004.