***

Verdi in old age made a famous observation on what he had “heard said about” young Puccini. (Almost certainly he heard for himself, but he liked to maintain an image of distance from the theatrical world.) “He follows the modern tendencies,” the account went, “and that’s natural, but he remains attached to melody, which is neither new nor old.”

But what is melody? Many years ago I met Gian Carlo Menotti for a lunch to which he was an hour late. He explained that he had been running around Charleston to find a bank that would cash his paycheck on the spot so he could FedEx a money order to the Internal Revenue Service. As soon as he caught his breath he started talking about the mystery that was on his mind: “Why is this a melody” — here he sang the Barcarolle from The Tales of Hoffmann — “but this is not a melody?” — here the same three pitches in the same rhythm, but in a different order. At the time I thought “maestro, if you knew the answer, your royalties would be so high….” Well, who knows, maybe if they had been that high he would have gotten in even more tax trouble. But I think he would have wanted to fill his operas with melody if he had been granted the knack for it that Puccini or Paul McCartney had.

A true definition of melody could occupy a whole book and still prove elusive, but here are a few characteristics relevant to opera. A good melody tends to lodge easily in the memory of musical listeners, in such fashion that they can find its intervals spontaneously if they feel like recalling it out loud. It tends toward metrical symmetry (most often in four-bar periods and their multiples) without being bound to it. Its asymmetries, if any, stimulate by reference to an implied regularity whose avoidance the listener can perceive as surprise, intensification, contradiction, or playfulness. It gives pleasure to people who like to sing for the sake of singing (along with, but distinct from, singing for the sake of giving voice to someone’s compositions).

It is not necessarily developed into a full-length song form (such as the standard American 32-bar pop tune or the predictable patterns of a Donizetti cavatina), but its elements are apt for such development if desired. It may go far beyond the reach of folksong in surprises, modulations, irregularities, or dissonances, yet it does not lose contact with what folksong stamps on the communal memory: the intervallic patterns, the sense of departure and arrival, the divisibility into component phrases. A really first-rate melody unfolds in a way that seems inevitable while having a profile that seems unique to itself. Two ultra-famous and totally “singable” Verdi melodies in 3/8 time are the Duke’s “La donna è mobile” from Rigoletto and the drinking song (“Libiam ne’ lieti calici”) in La traviata. The first is utterly regular — eight-bar phrases, one line of verse for every two bars — while the second begins with striking asymmetry in ten-bar phrases (six for the first line, four for the second, a highly unusual pattern). But it is “striking” only if you stop to think about it, which you don’t; maybe the extra beats raise the wattage a little, but because the melody has successfully defined its own terms, it just sings, and everybody can sing along.