The musical highlight of my 1997 opera season was a performance of Handel’s Ariodante in Amsterdam, presented in concert form, which means they just stand there and sing: no costumes, no scenery, no awkward gestures, and no collapsing backdrops. Mark Minkowski conducted one of the most thrilling performances of a Handel opera I’ve ever heard, and Anne Sofie von Otter confirmed my long-held opinion that she is among the best singers performing today. Ariodante is one of the roles Handel wrote for a castrato, and because—alas—there are no castrati singing today, the part is sung by a woman, usually a mezzo-soprano, as in this case. But Ariodante’s a guy. Even though the man who originally sang the role wasn’t an entire guy, eighteenth-century audiences were familiar with the convention, and so they pretended all of him was there. Two hundred years later, though the singers have female body parts, we go along with our version of the convention and still pretend that Ariodante’s a guy.
I eagerly awaited the issue of the CD, curious to confirm my aural memory. Finally, in Musik Hug on Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich I found it and was promptly given it by a too generous friend. The label was clear enough, for there was the name—Ariodante—and there was Anne Sofie von Otter to prove it. She stood there, photographed in black and white, her left shoulder covered by a piece of body armor, that sort of engraved metalwork you see in museums when you look at the knights’ armor and marvel at how short they were. It’s got a delicate tracery of flowers and birds yet looks strong enough to protect her shoulder from a whacking blow. But under it she’s wearing a black cocktail dress cut to a low V in front, and just the least little bit of décolletage is showing.
Décolletage? Ariodante’s got a bosom? But Ariodante’s a guy. Okay, okay, I know he’s not really a guy, ’cause he’s sung by a girl, but he’s supposed to be a guy. And guys don’t have bosoms. They have muscles.
I studied her face. Her hair was cut like a guy’s, but her hair has been cut like a guy’s for years. When you’re six feet tall that’s probably wise. And she’s wearing lipstick, badly penciled eyebrows, and has been caught looking off to the left as if wondering when this ridiculous photo session was going to end.
Intrigued, I began to walk along the aisles of the classical music section, casting my eyes on the covers of various CDs, and after a quarter of an hour I finally got it. Music isn’t enough anymore, or it can no longer sell itself. Nope, it’s gotta be sex and music or, in the case of some of the dreadful covers I saw that day, only sex. Intrigued by the eroticism of their covers, I selected a few CDs and listened to them. There is a cellist who appears to be making love to her instrument, no doubt because it’s the only thing she knows how to do it with. There was something called Sensual Classics II, in the brochure for which a young couple seem to be making passionate love to each other’s clothing. Aspiring young sopranos provided more décolleté. But the best was a young Asian violinist standing in a large body of water, holding what appeared to be a white violin. Remarkable. Rather in the fashion of the eyes of those suffering Christs painted on velvet, her nipples followed my gaze wherever I moved in the room.
While the mixture of sex and popular music seems quite normal, the idea of its use as a means to sell classical music offends me. Suddenly disgusted with this tawdry cocktail, I took my CD and went home to listen to it. And spent three hours in heaven. Ariodante is heroic and passionate and Anne Sofie von Otter one of the great singers of the age. Bosom or no bosom.