Musetta's Waltz

So, now we are going to look at one of the great lyric sopranos. All great sopranos can handle all the different styles, but they are generally 'exploited' if I may put it that way, by the impresarios, for the style they are most favored for, by the ticket-buying public. 

This is a piece called 'Musetta's Waltz' and it is a highly erotically-charged lyric, filled with more than mere innuendo. You can learn a good deal about how to seduce people who are highly sexually charged themselves, by studying 'Musetta's Waltz.'

Bohemian interior styling of the Orientalism type

The song is set in a hypothetical cafe in Paris, in the midst of 'Bohemian' friends, and by 'Bohemian' it really is meant these are extremely wealthy people with time on their hands and who are essentially, rich but homeless in the sense that they are 'stateless citizens' following the splitting apart and destruction of various elements of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

This cafe is called the 'Cafe Momus' and Momus is a Greek god of satire and of poets - son of the Titan Goddess 'Nyx.' He is depicted as a figure lifting a mask from his face.

...Lifting ...a mask ...from his face.

Are you still with me?

Momus, although a real god, was sent away out of Olympus to the Earth, in somewhat similar, although not quite the same, way, as Harlequin. And he was sort of 'exiled' from Olympus for constantly mocking the Olympians.

Though secretly, Zeus, King of the Gods, approves of him.

'Gentlemen! Gentlemen! Have you no decency?!'

In high level Arabic literature, Ibn Arabi deals also with this theme, in his concept of 'Barzak Futuhat' - an intermediate place between death and resurrection. In standard translations this is called 'the openings revealed,' but it means what we say today: 'portals...'

Are you still with me?

Are you catching on, to anything that is ringing any bells?

Anyway - the utterly incomparable Anna Netrebko, and Musetta's Waltz; a thoroughly disgusting rude and x-rated piece of erotica if there ever was one.