ABSTRACT

Denial, loss and prohibition are important subtexts to the cycle, but this is also a work that deliberately flaunts with excess, with trespass, testing the boundaries of pleasure to stare into the abyss of madness. In particular, when the erotic subject is placed in a position of vulnerability in relation to the dominant order, climaxes become associated with delirious madness, enervating intoxication and licentious excess. Several discussions of musical portrayals of madness have employed the metaphors of boundary and excess. The last of the muezzin songs is replete with the Orphic images: the beloved’s beautiful body is lost, buried in sand, and the music heightens the sense of an approach to the border of eroticism and insanity and the deathly embrace of the abyss. The muezzin’s voicing of the homoerotic attraction for the beloved youth may be, to what Szymanowski called ‘common, public sense’, a transgression, but in another sense it involves a necessary withdrawal.