Ah, music. The sacred art. Holy, intellectual, ascetic, other-worldly… Or is it?
There is, like it or not, a correlation between music and sex: from the creative process itself – Sigmund Freud recognised that – to the simple marketing truism that sex sells.
There’s a rich vein of eroticism to be found in centuries-worth of music. People’s ideas of what this constitutes, however, can differ tremendously, so here’s a disclaimer: I’m writing as a heterosexual cis-gender woman who’s been happily married for 28 years (though I did go round the block a few times in my misspent youth). You might get a very different musical menu from somebody else.
Classical music's most erotic works
1. Ravel: Daphnis et Chloé
For instance, one person might find the long build-up in Maurice Ravel’s Boléro titillating, but their partner could spend its duration lying there wondering what colour to paint the ceiling. I’ve also seen Ravel described as cold, detached and lacking any eroticism, yet his ballet score Daphnis et Chloé is to me, obviously, one of the most sensually gorgeous creations in history, oozing with passion under the blaze of a Grecian dawn.
2. Debussy: Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
Similarly, Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune is a harp-sluiced heat-haze that draws together long-breathed, ecstatic melody, a cross-rhythmic sighing akin to Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, the tingle of exotic eastern timbales... Yes, yes, yes!
Debussy was essentially a symbolist, and in symbolism nothing is what it seems. An orchestral piece supposedly about the sea might really be suggesting the forces of nature behind something completely different. Listen to La mer, and go figure.
Indeed, any prize for the world’s sexiest musical nation must go to the French. Those sophisticated Parisians understand that less is more; and they know exactly how to create it. Look at Debussy’s manuscripts and it’s clear that everything in his music, including that deep-seated sweep and surge, is achieved with the greatest precision. In the orchestra, on the piano or in the bedroom, strong technique goes a long way.
3. Gabriel Fauré: Nocturne No. 4
If you think Debussy is seductive, try Gabriel Fauré. One of his former lovers, Emma Bardac, later married Debussy (the two of them are pictured further up); but fortunately, we don’t have to choose between them. In life, Fauré’s reputation as lothario even exceeded Debussy’s, and in his works, the sensual element is enhanced by being veiled.
His music keeps its clothes on, but makes you dream all the more of what lies beneath. The Fourth Nocturne is a fine example of his twisting, sliding harmonies, the well-paced build-up, the shifting shades of emotions on either side of the climactic centre.
Voluptuous Wagner
4. Richard Wagner: Tristan und Isolde
French music in that era, however, was enjoying a love-hate relationship with one special German influence, arguably the most erotic music of all.
In 1852, Richard Wagner met Mathilde Wesendonck, the youthful wife of a silk merchant in Switzerland. Her husband sponsored the composer and even gave him a house to live in – Wagner was on the run from German political troubles – and it appears that out of loyalty to their respective spouses, the illicitly enamoured pair probably decided not to consummate their passion.
Thank goodness they didn’t, because otherwise we might never have had Tristan und Isolde. (As Balzac is rumoured to have said between the sheets, ‘There goes another novel.’)
Wagner appears to have channelled his frustrations into a score fashioned as a sonic incarnation of a state of constant arousal without satisfaction. The harmonies, intensely chromatic, evolve continually, but every time you think there will be a great resolution, the music swerves instead into another new direction.
There could be no clearer demonstration of the correlation between musical and sexual processes. Some people, even hardened (so to speak) Wagnerians, can find the full Tristan slightly enervating. But in Act II’s love scene, ‘O sink hernieder, Nacht der Liebe’, Wagner is realising the ideal he felt he could never reach in real life. All you can do, faced with such music, is sweet surrender.
Clara Schumann's disgust
Unless, of course, you are Clara Schumann. In 1875 she attended a performance in Munich. ‘To be forced to see and listen to such sexual frenzy the whole evening, in which every feeling of decency is violated… that is the saddest thing I have experienced in my entire artistic life,’ she wrote. But then she added: ‘I endured it to the end since I wanted to hear the whole thing...’ Yes, I bet she did.
Sensuous Strauss
5. Puccini: Madam Butterfly
One other love duet rivals Tristan, to my ears, and it is by that great master of emotional manipulation, Giacomo Puccini. At the end of Act I of Madam Butterfly, Lieutenant Pinkerton is alone with his 15-year-old Japanese bride. We know it will all end in tears, but for now, the music gives us Butterfly’s first awakening to radiant, untainted passion. Pinkerton can’t wait to get her into bed, but she lingers outside, stargazing, cherishing the night. What a score; what sensitive, pliable, luminous gorgeousness. Puccini is out to take your breath away, and it works every time.
6. Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier
So does – er, I’ll never forget hearing the opening of Der Rosenkavalier for the first time. It’s not what you expect on the car radio at 6pm on a wet Sunday in Hackney. The horns plunge in, working up to repeated whoops; and afterwards the entire violin section heats up and goes bananas. When the curtain goes up, there are the Marschallin and her Octavian, in bed. Three cheers for Richard Strauss, acknowledging the female orgasm in 1911.
7. Strauss: Don Juan
Strauss had form in creating explicit music. One of his first great successes was the tone poem Don Juan, in which the eponymous anti-hero swashbuckles from woman to woman in a hopeless search for perfection. Strauss furnishes the successive affairs with heady melody and lavish orchestration – sweet and searing solo violin and oboes, shudderings of harp, horny horns shouting in ecstasy.
8. Strauss: Salome
Then along came Salome: an opera in which the titillation level rarely sinks below 99.8 per cent, with a striptease in the middle in ‘The Dance of the Seven Veils’. It proved a succès de scandale for 1905. Sex sells; Salome sold; Strauss made his fortune.
9. Robert Schumann: Fantasie
But for true eroticism in music, you don’t need a big orchestra or singers. You need intimacy: perhaps just one piano, played by one person with, crucially, a sensitive touch. Try Robert Schumann’s Fantasie in C. The C is for Clara. The final movement is a song of everlasting love for her – music in which the composer’s heart and soul seems vulnerable, sincere, all-giving.
10. Chopin: Ballade No. 4
C is also for Frédéric Chopin, who is almost weirdly erotic. He may have been personally unfulfilled in that department, being too ill for most of his adult life. Yet you might feel implied (never explicit) narrative progressions in his works that seem to hold the tensions, anguishes, reconciliations and reunions of a close relationship.
Try the E flat Nocturne Op. 55 No. 2, where a turbulent duet unfurls over the wide-spun accompaniment; or the Ballade No. 4 in F minor, at whose climax it feels as if the lovers are discovered in flagrante and quite possibly murdered. Everyone will invent their own stories for these pieces.
11. Scarlatti: Sonatas
This next one may surprise you: Domenico Scarlatti, for the elegance, the understatement, the intimacy. Deft, twinkling fingerwork, songfulness, these infinite shades of emotion – a different one for every sonata – can prove remarkably seductive.
12. Franz Liszt
Still, we can’t talk about sexy pianists without mentioning Franz Liszt. Six foot tall with patrician features and sea-green eyes, he was so magnetic that women would steal the water he had washed in (Saltburn, drink your heart out).
His music was arguably more often inspired by religious rather than sexual ecstasy, despite sparking the latter in others; but to find him at his sexiest, try the three Petrarch Sonnets, the ‘Jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este’ and, above all, No. 11 of the Transcendental Études, ‘Harmonies du Soir’.
13. Franz Schubert: Grand Duo
There’s one thing more erotic at the piano than one person playing: two people playing together. Franz Schubert’s piano duets, especially the Fantasie in F minor and the ‘Grand Duo’ (a full-scale, symphonically structured sonata), are up there with his finest works. The legend goes that he fell for one of his pupils – a Hungarian countess, naturally – but being a humble musician, the only way he could sit close to her and feel her fingers brush against his own was to play piano duets.
Racy Renaissance
14. Monteverdi: 'Lamento della Ninfa'
Let’s look further back, though, because there is no music more erotic than that of Renaissance Italy: the sophisticated, all-perceiving works of the languorous Barbara Strozzi (such as 'Begl'occhi bel seno', or 'Beautiful eyes, beautiful breasts', below), or Claudio Monteverdi, who would stop at nothing to create the ultimate in feeling.
The final duet of Monteverdi's L’incoronazione di Poppea, ‘Pur ti miro’, brings the hero and heroine together after they’ve murdered or trampled on everybody else; but they are so in love, and singing in such exquisite dissonance and resolution, that we forgive them. Also, hear his madrigals and especially ‘Lamento della Ninfa’ – a nymph mourns her lost love while two shepherds watch (perhaps considering a try at consoling her?). Ohimè.
15. Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 21
How about Mozart? His trilogy of operas with the librettist Lorenzo da Ponte contain some of the most sexually charged operatic music in existence. It is not just Don Giovanni that hits the bull’s-eye. To me, Così fan tutte is still more sophisticated, specifically the seduction scene in which Dorabella and Guglielmo feel one another’s heartbeats; there’s no doubting what’s about to take place.
If you want absolute eroticism in Mozart, however, you need the Piano Concerto No. 21, K467. The slow movement. Find it. Play it in the bath, with candlelight and scented bubbles…
All in all, it’s worth recognising and celebrating the sensuality that is packed into the music we love to hear – and not always the music you might expect. And as for Der Rosenkavalier, I’ll have what she’s having.
