Klarinet Archive - Posting 000026.txt from 2008/02

From: "Susan Ullom Hungerford" <susan@-----.com>
Subj: Re: [kl] Strauss' use of orgasms
Date: Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:30:28 -0500

We are currently running Magic Flute ... she ain't topless. Whew!

Susan Ullom Hungerford
Opera Pacific
Production Associate/Education
shungerford@-----.org
susan@-----.com
714 830-6312

----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Leeson" <dnleeson@-----.net>
To: <klarinet@-----.org>
Sent: Friday, February 01, 2008 2:28 PM
Subject: RE: [kl] Strauss' use of orgasms

> There is the opera with a title similar to "Lady Macbeth of Mzenk" in
> which,
> in the San Francisco production, the two main characters simulate sex in a
> bed in full view of the audience. Maybe in wasn't simulated. And some
> clothes were worn. I couldn't tell because I was in the balcony.
>
> Mozart's use of clarinets was invariably romantic, and not sexual. He
> used
> them frequently in pairs and in support of a female character. The Noturni
> for 2 women and 1 man accompanied by combinations of clarinets and basset
> horns (which I played with Forrest in Las Vegas a couple of years ago),
> are
> very much romantic.
>
> But I don't know of a single case of Mozart using clarinets in a sexual
> sense. Even in Don Giovanni, they stay out of the sex business.
>
> But also in San Francisco during the 1991 commemoration of Mozart's death,
> a
> soprano sang the Magic Flute's first Queen of the Night aria, topless, and
> upside down on a trapeze.
>
> It was breathtakeing and I lost my place in the music, so occupried was I.
>
> Dan Leeson
> dnleeson@-----.net
> SKYPE: dnleeson
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alexander Brash [mailto:brash@-----.edu]
> Sent: Friday, February 01, 2008 1:27 PM
> To: klarinet@-----.org
> Subject: Re: [kl] Strauss' use of orgasms
>
>
> This thread might have some real potential.
>
> I know there was a scandal with Nijinsky's original portrayal of the Faun
> in the Debussy - he apparently mimed masturbation and climax onstage (not
> spamming here, it even shows up in the wiki article on him).
>
> Other musical or artistic portrayals of coitus? I think Mozart often used
> clarinets to indicate the hanky-panky was about to start, but I'm sure Dan
> knows more details :)
>
> Alex
>
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, February 1, 2008 12:29 pm, Daniel Leeson wrote:
>> In speaking about Salome, I mentioned that Strauss presented music to
>> describe Salome's orgasm. This apprentaly is her first because she is a
>> real
>> necrophiliac, unable to achieve sexual satisfaction except in the present
>> of
>> a dead body or even a fragment of a body. And she would have had little
>> previous opportunity or experience with that kind of thing. (By the way,
>> necrophila is illegal almost everywhere. It is pretty icky stuff.)
>>
>> But that opera was not the last time that Strauss would use orchestral
>> music
>> to simulate an orgasm.
>>
>> Just before the curtain rises on Rosenkavalier's first act, the
>> orchestral
>> music infers that the couple (the 17-year old Octavian and the 36 year
>> old
>> Marshallin) are having sex. And suddenly, in case you are from a small
>> midwestern town and don't know much about this kind of thing, Stauss give
>> the orchestra's 4 horns some three or four giant whoops, that simply have
>> no
>> place in the orchestral music's material. But now that you know what they
>> are, pay attention to the music the next time you hear or play
>> Rosenkavalier.
>>
>> Dan Leeson
>> dnleeson@-----.net
>> SKYPE: dnleeson
>>
>>
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>
>
>
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