Читать книгу No Second Eden - Turner Cassity - Страница 15

Transpositions

Somewhere between the sexes and between the staves

The countertenor makes his thin falsetto waves,

As if the treble clef were warring on the bass,

Androgyny on gender. Music puts a face

Upon castration, as an actor lacking thrust

Might pad a codpiece. Character, but only just.

However, roles in the Baroque were not hard-line

Screen realism, and in art the surest sign

Of desperation is exactly to record:

The nightingale in Pines of Rome, the word-for-word

Transcriptions in the ’30s novels. Keep in mind

That, once an epoch and its codes are well behind,

Heroic cannot easily be set apart

From mock heroic of the same milieu. So, cart

Before the horse, the operatic stage may see

Cross-dressing and cross-voicing not as travesty

But tribute. And, in any case, it’s all a drag.

Castrati had no choice; male altos need not brag.

Orphée, Rinaldo, Xerxes can as well be sung

By mezzos with a good costumer and the lung.

There is a lingering unease in neither/nor.

It’s what the certainty fish isn’t fowl is for.