The New York Times, by Donal Henahan

By Donal Henahan

It is difficult to keep up with science in our kaleidoscopic times, but we must not give up trying. With that thought in mind, I wish to direct your attention to a study published in the December issue of Psychology Today that should give heart to all hard-working musicians, many of whom may not fully realize the awesome power they hold over all of us. A Stanford University pharmacologist, we are told, analyzed responses of more than 250 people and found that 96 percent experienced thrills in response to music ''far exceeding the rate for an expected thriller, sexual activity.'' The respondents told Avram Goldstein, the inquiring pharmacologist, that ''musical passages'' elicited greater thrills than the following, in descending order by percentage:

Scene in a movie, play, ballet or book (92); great beauty in nature or art (87); physical contact with another person (78); climactic moment in opera (72); sexual activity (70); nostalgic moments (70); watching emotional interactions between people (67); viewing beautiful painting, photograph or sculpture (67) and moments of inspiration (65).

As you see, ''sexual activity'' received the same percentage of votes as ''nostalgic moments,'' according to the Stanford scientist's count, and apparently all precincts are in. If you yourself happen not to have been surveyed, remember that scientists can spend only so much time at the office, like everybody else. Your demographic double, it is assumed, was included among the 250 persons who responded. In any event, it is ''musical passages'' by a landslide. And remember, even President Reagan didn't thrill 96 percent of the people last time a count was taken.

How seriously should we take the Stanford study? Very seriously indeed. In fact, these findings correlate closely with a scientific survey that I myself made some time ago and did not find time to publish. I asked 10 people in a high education/income bracket to tell me what sort of music they liked to listen to in their spare time. Ninety percent confessed that all they cared to hear were motets by Josquin des Prez, while 10 per cent felt that nothing but Bach's cantatas would do. Brahms, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Springsteen, sexual activity, finding money in the street and getting a raise at work were not even mentioned by my respondents. (As in any scientifically conducted survey, my margin of error was calculated at between 4 and 96 percent.) I realize that my findings may come as a surprise to sectors of the scientific community, since the only polling previously done in this area, by the Literary Digest in 1936, indicated that 96 percent of the general populace would consent to hear nothing but the 12-tone works of Schoenberg.

The Stanford pharmacologist's study further discloses, according to the Psychology Today article, that people describe a thrill as ''feeling like a chill, shudder, tingling or tickling, often accompanied by goose bumps, a lump in the throat or weeping.'' I do not hesitate to admit that Stanford has gone beyond my technologically primitive research, which did not include such refinements as a goose-bump gauge or a tear meter. However, I am not at all sure that chills and shudders, let alone weeping, are an appropriate response to a Josquin motet or that a tactful poll-taker ought to notice such responses. What is important to notice is that the Stanford researcher and I agree that when an overwhelming number of people tell you they are more thrilled by music than by, say, ''physical contact with another person,'' it would be rude not to believe them. The only thing I find difficult to understand is why Dr. Ruth Westheimer does not call her television program ''Good Music.'' Perhaps she will, now that the results are in.

It is not generally understood outside the scientific community how remarkably little sexual activity is actually going on in the world today and how dramatically sex has been outpaced by music listening in our society. The demographic studies are still being run, I presume, and a Congressional committee will eventually be obliged to examine the matter in depth, with Joan Collins and Prince as key witnesses. However, one has only to see a young couple walking along in the park, faces alight with bliss, their individual headphones in place, to understand that the human race may be on the road to extinction. Is that an alarmist view? It hardly seems so.

As a professional listener, I would not want to be in the position of denigrating any form of music, but when 72 percent of the public admits to being more thrilled by a ''climactic moment in opera'' than by actual, hands-on romance, where are we headed? To a world, it seems clear, in which ''musical passages'' will be under strict government control because of their potential for affecting the political and social structure. Shrewd old Plato foresaw the destructive potential of music more than 20 centuries ago and denounced it, though for reasons that we would now regard as partly ill-founded. He believed music caused youth to cut up and defy society, which cannot be denied, but he also deplored it as an aphrodisiac that could set off bacchanalian partying in the Athenian woods and lead to excessive sexual activity. We now know, thanks to the Stanford study, how wrong Plato was. Music, not sex, is the preeminent human thriller and therefore the clear and present danger to society.

In the course of his research, the Stanford scientist discovered that the thrills experienced by a listener tend to follow a pattern, which you may be surprised to know generally corresponds to dramatic peaks and valleys in the music itself. However, he cautions, not all people who listen to a given piece respond with the same thrill pattern: ''Evidently, the emotional content is perceived differently by different people,'' he notes. ''Often, subjects told me, what makes a certain musical passage able to elicit thrills is some association with an emotionally charged event or a particular person in the subject's past, as though the music had become a conditioned stimulus for the emotional response.''

In other words, dear, they're playing our song. But don't scoff, please. It sometimes takes science to give a cliche new life.

By Donal Henahan

The most common line that occurs in letters of objection received by music critics, according to a small, privately financed poll, is this one: ''I really can't believe we heard the same concert.'' It is such a stock response that it tends to dull whatever sharp points the complainant may have tried to make. That is because the trouble with most cliches is not that they are false but that they simply are too old and tired to sing anymore. They are too true to be good.

Nevertheless, the critic who gives the matter any thought will readily admit, cliche or no cliche, that he does not hear the same concert as his readers. It should be obvious that no two members of any audience hear exactly the same musical performance. No two of us possess exactly the same degree of aural acuity or pitch perception. Our musical background and training vary. No two listeners have exactly the same temperament, life experiences, social standing and cultural advantages.

You are, let us suppose, an only child; I happen to be the 17th in a brood of 35. I am tall, handsome and impossibly rich; you are rather plain. You are a sensitive flower; I am a clodhopping boor. I came to the concert hungry, while you dined downtown on Tex-Mex, a fact of which you begin to be reminded in the middle of the slow movement. Or, in each case, the other way around. In sum, though the sounds transmitted by the instruments, human or mechanical, go out on specific and identifiable wavelengths, each of us picks them up with a slightly different antenna that adds its own interesting static.

As if the foregoing litany of truisms were not enough, consider the unavoidable problem of acoustics. Music as an art does not come to life until someone or something disturbs the air in odd ways that we recognize as pleasurable or otherwise interesting sound. Just how interesting that sound turns out to be depends largely on acoustics, whose effects may change in significance from performance to performance and from performer to performer. Although the basic character of any hall does not change much from performance to performance (let us ignore such variables as temperature and movable shells), the acoustical equation varies drastically for an orchestra playing a Mahler symphony, for a soprano singing Schubert lieder or for a string quartet playing Webern's Opus 5.

That is why critics regularly find it necessary to take the acoustical character of a hall into consideration when reviewing performances. It can never be a dead issue, discussed once and buried forever. Whatever the venue, it remains one of the factors - sometimes the overriding factor - that any musician must deal with, night in and night out. In fairness to the artist, then, it is often not only proper but necessary to point out how the ambiance a hall may have affected the performance, whether for good or evil.

Let us say, for instance, that I go to Bayreuth and hear a baritone whom I know from other experience to have a voice of middling size. I am thrilled to discover that the tone has become not only heroically large but remarkably rich and expressive. He has blossomed from a timid mumbler into Wotan. I am forced to suspect that the smallness of the Bayreuth theater and its famously resonant acoustics have had something to do with this apparent miracle. The artist himself may even sing better and more confidently, knowing he need not shout to be heard.

Or, say I hear the same pianist play a Brahms concerto in Carnegie Hall and a Mozart concerto in Avery Fisher Hall. The Brahms should sound better in Carnegie, a hall that is more attuned to the Romantic repertory, while the Mozart may come off very well in the drier ambiance of Avery Fisher. But nothing in art is that simple. What also must come into play are innumerable factors such as the size of the audience (more bodies soak up more sound), the piano chosen by the soloist (different pieces demand different keyboard actions, different voicing adjustments and so on) and his tone-producing methods. Nor can we overlook the volatile question of the stylistic conceptions and musicianship of both pianist and conductor.

Rather often, to be sure, the quality of a performance overshadows acoustical questions and every other question as well. I may prefer certain music performed in an intimate place seating a couple of hundred devotees, but if a Dietrich-Fischer Dieskau decides to sing ''Winterreise'' in Carnegie Hall, I probably will be there, making whatever allowances are necessary. In the same way, I might prefer to hear the Tokyo String Quartet in my parlor rather than in Avery Fisher Hall's expanses, but sometimes we have to take what we can get where we can get it. A critic must reserve the right and duty, however, to mention the acoustical problems inherent in such mismatches of hall and artist where they seriously affect the musical outcome.

People with particularly keen ears would like us to believe that they sometimes can detect acoustical differences simply by moving into an adjoining seat. It is not necessarily to believe them to recognize that significant changes do occur from area to area. In both Avery Fisher Hall and Carnegie, for instance, I have often been impressed by hearing orchestral tone increase in roundness and musical fidelity when I moved to a rear location from my usual seat in the center of the hall. The move brings a slight loss in brightness and presence but a compensatory gain in focus, perhaps because of the proximity of back and side walls. Similarly, the standing-room on Carnegie's main floor offers strikingly rich sound, although it is under an overhang that might logically be supposed to dull the tone.

Do not take from this that the best seats in any house are always at the rear or under a balcony. I remember what a shock I had one night in the old Met when I moved after intermission from a side seat, which was under a balcony, to a higher-rent district in the center of the house. The voices blossomed and the orchestra sounded like an orchestra, not like an ensemble trapped in a sewer. The old Met, in fact, was famously eccentric in its acoustics, with more variety of tone and volume from place to place than in any hall I have known. There was even an acoustically charmed spot on the stage from where, according to legend, voices projected with special power, naturally amplified by some structural accident or other. Artists were said to jostle each other for the favored spot, like racehorses fighting for position in the home stretch, but I must confess I never witnessed that scene and find it hard to conceive of such unseemly behavior by opera singers.

So, I am sorry to belabor the point, sir or madame, but you are right: you and I do not, cannot, hear the same concert or opera or recital. Not ever. If nothing else, it is important to remember that each of us occupies a different space in the hall, one body to a seat. (In uptown halls, at least, anything cosier than that traditional arrangement would be broken up immediately by the ushers.) And even your seat selection can make a significant difference. For some reason that probably could be explained by a social theoretician such as Theodor Adorno or Walter Benjamin, the less you are able to spend for a seat in most halls, the better you will hear the music. As a rule, sound improves as you go up into the balcony, any balcony. Generations of poor but discerning students have known as much. As music listeners grow older, more conscious of status and less keen of ear, their need to sit closer to the performers becomes greater. So, demographically speaking, does their ability to pay for the supposedly choice front seats. It's almost algebraically neat, isn't it? Unfortunately, at the moment I can't think of anything else that is uncomplicated about the question of why people hear different concerts in the same hall on the same night. Sorry.

By Donal Henahan

The farewell appearances of great singers are generally exercises in patience for their admirers. Happy to say, Thursday night's performance of ''Aida'' at the Metropolitan, billed in the program as ''Leontyne Price's farewell to opera,'' might just as well have been entitled ''Patience Rewarded.'' The 57-year-old soprano took an act or two to warm to her work, but what she delivered in the Nile Scene turned out to be well worth the wait. In her most taxing aria, ''O patria mia,'' there were powerful reminders of the Price that we remember best and want to remember, a Price beyond pearls. It was, intermittently but often enough to make the evening a memorable event, the singing of an artist of distinctive vocal timbre and personality.

It was a sentiment-soaked evening from the start, studded with long, affectionate ovations and curtain calls that Miss Price bathed in luxuriously while ''Live From the Met'' television cameras recorded the occasion from virtually every corner of the house. Her handling of the prolonged outbreak of approval at the conclusion of ''O patria mia'' was nothing less than a master class in the art of the diva. She rang all the classic changes, from the hands held up in prayerful gratitude, to the uplifted then downcast eyes, to the ultimate stroke of sinking to a knee. The audience made clear that it loved every masterly gesture, too. It had come primed to cheer the artist on the occasion of her 193rd Metropolitan performance (44 as Aida) and let her know it appreciated her career. The celebration at the end of the evening went on for 25 minutes, which adds up to a lot of cheering, bouquet throwing and confetti strewing.

Actually, Miss Price's singing during her Nile Scene duet with Radames produced even subtler artistry than her big aria, though to far less noisy applause, as she cajoled her lover to desert to the Ethiopian cause. The tone here was genuinely buttery, carefully produced but firmly under control and recognizably Price-like. Phrases took on a seductive sinuousness that coaxed James McCracken, an otherwise gross and insensitive Radames, to try for nuances of tone and volume. Mr. McCracken, who began inauspiciously with a loudly bleated, untuned ''Celeste A"ida,'' had nowhere to go but up. He made no attempt to give out the aria's final B flat quietly, which is difficult but possible for any good tenor.

In all truth, this production of Verdi's most abused opera is not one in which an important artist should have been asked to make a farewell appearance. It is the same dramatically inert, unatmospheric, scenically ludicrous affair that John Dexter produced in 1975 with Miss Price and Mr. McCracken in the leading roles. James Levine, who conducted the premiere, was back this time, vainly trying to pump life into as dreary a show as the Met has in its repertory.

In ordinary circumstances, it would have been reprehensible to find one of the great Verdi sopranos of our time trapped in such a distasteful affair. But, since the night was designed as Leontyne Price's vehicle of departure, its deficiencies had to be overlooked. At first, an anxious listener also had to wonder whether the real Leontyne Price would ever appear. She sang shakily and tentatively in the first act, with an effortful top and without dramatic thrust. She did not begin to sound at all Price-like until halfway through ''Ritorna vincitor!'' when she managed beautifully the prayerful hush of ''Numi piet a.'' This was the Price we had been waiting for. When her name is mentioned in the opera history books we will recall that vibrant, soaring tone - that and the blinding, high-beam-headlight smile that she flashed on her fans at each curtain call.

Beyond Miss Price, there was little to recommend the performance. Simon Estes, incongruously gotten up in a pink robe as if he were about to play the Mikado rather than the Ethiopian king Amonasro, contributed solidly to the Nile Scene. And Fiorenza Cossotto, though in rather reedy voice throughout, made a vocally plausible Amneris.

The Cast:

AIDA, opera in four acts, music by Giuseppe Verdi; libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni from the French prose of Camille du Locle, plot by Mariette Bey; conducted by James Levine; produced by John Dexter; sets designed by David Reppa; costumes designed by Peter J. Hall; lighting designed by Gil Wechsler; stage director, Bruce Donnell; choreography by Louis Johnson. Performed by the Metropolitan Opera. Aida: Leontyne Price Amneris: Fiorenza Cossotto Radames: James McCracken Amonasro: Simon Estes Ramfis: John Macurdy King: Dimitri Kavrakos Priestess: Therese Brandson Messenger: Robert Nagy

By Donal Henahan

Great composers and their music inevitably become icons, so easily worshiped that it can take a leap of imagination to see past the image and glimpse the reality, the miracle of the musical achievement itself. Handel and Bach, those twin peaks of the Baroque, sum up the problem. A few of their better works have become hardly more than venerated relics, so continually and so reverently kissed for three centuries that they have been rubbed smooth. The outline of the work is there for us, but its meaning or meanings tend to fade.

Until something happens to shake us out of music-business routine and complacency, such as the tricentennial celebration of their births this year, the same familiar pieces get performed endlessly, so that we hear the ''Messiah,'' say, in the same spirit as we look at reproductions of the Mona Lisa. That is to say, we hardly experience it at all. If it were not for this birthday celebration, would we ever have had Handel's ''Rinaldo'' and ''Alcina'' at New York's two leading opera houses? And would we ever have been exposed us to such rarities as ''Orlando,'' ''Ariodante,'' ''Semele'' and ''Alessandro,'' to mention only this season's Handel opera schedule at Carnegie Hall? Famous though they are, we still know only the surface of the oceans named Bach and Handel.

Worse yet, the identities of these two ancients may tend to run together in the mind. After all, weren't they born less than a month apart (Handel on Feb. 23 and Bach on March 21) in German towns separated by about 80 miles as the jet flies (Halle and Eisenach)? Weren't they both enormously prolific and fastidious craftsmen? Weren't they both virtuosic organists? Didn't they both compose stacks of religious music? Didn't they both go blind in old age and didn't the same English surgeon treat them both? And, most confusingly, didn't they both wear wigs?

All true. But rarely can two composers from essentially the same cultural roots have developed in such different directions. Handel, in the tradition of so many musicians before him and since, left home early and traveled to Italy where he soaked himself in the vocal tradition of the warm south. In his Italian years he composed more than 100 cantatas, two operas, two oratorios, and some Latin psalms and motets. By the time he settled in London in 1713, Handel was a sophisticated, well-traveled young genius of 28 with a passion for the theater. Fortunately, London at the time was in the grip of an Italian opera craze, so he found himself right at home. He became an Englishman in all but speech - his German accent never left him - and despite some ups and downs in popularity became England's most honored composer since Purcell. At his own request, he was buried in Westminster Abbey, where the mourners - I nearly said audience - numbered 3,000.

A burly, bluff man, Handel was also a well-rounded cosmopolitan of unusual taste and perception who was rich enough and smart enough at one point to buy a large Rembrandt. He gained a reputation for irritability and fits of sudden anger, which sounds credible when you remember the story of his throwing his wig at a particularly stupid musician. On another occasion he is supposed to have picked up a female singer and held her out a window, threatening to drop her unless she agreed to sing something properly. It is such tales as these that musicologists take delight in undermining - perhaps both have been consigned to Handel apocrypha by now - but it cannot be doubted that Handel must have been a pretty formidable fellow, a kind of musical Samuel Johnson or Mr. T.

Singers will tell you that Handel's music is easier to handle than Bach's. Rather like Liszt's florid piano music, Handel's vocal pieces are written with the instrument firmly in mind, rarely making the musician sound clumsy or pressured, no matter how elaborate and decorative the writing. He achieves a special kind of unforced majesty in his arias, both in the operas and the oratorios, that resists analysis. Listen, for instance, to John McCormack singing ''Where 'er you walk'' or Kathleen Ferrier in ''Ombra mai fu'' or Gigli in ''Care selve.'' What strikes you about such seemingly simple arias is that they tempt you to think you could sing them as well as anyone. You, after all, have an inner nobility that may not always show itself in the voice but comes out thrillingly at times, especially when you are alone.

In this respect, as in so many others, Bach and Handel are decidedly different composers. Although Bach knew how to write for the voice and spent most of his life doing it supremely well, he tended to ignore the little things that make a singer love a composer, little things such as letting the singer breathe once in a while. Bach thought instrumentally even when writing for the voice, so it is characteristic of his vocal line that it often might be be handled as effectively and with greater ease by a violin. The solo voice in many of Bach's cantatas, for instance, would transcribe with perfect effectiveness for oboe or cello or piano. But it hard to think of Handel's ''O sleep! Why dost thou leave me'' or ''Lascia ch'io pianga'' without hearing a particular vocal timbre. In Bach's cantatas and passions, we tend to hear Bach first and last; in Handel's vocal music we first hear Ameling or Baker or Schipa or Peerce.

Handel, though a man of the opera house, also was religious enough to write a string of splendid oratorios and other sacred pieces. It must be assumed that he was a sincere believer. However, he was ensnared by this world early and seems to have worn his religious beliefs lightly. He apparently cleaved to no rigid dogma. Bach was a stricter sort of believer, as befit a native of Luther's hometown. He was caught up in the mysticism of the years and - though scholars now argue about this - probably remained reasonably devout to the end. However, like most musicians of his day and since, he had to be an opportunist. When he was employed by churches, as in Arnstadt, Muhlhausen and Leipzig, he composed mostly devotional music; when he was in the hire of the Duke Wilhelm of Weimar or Prince Leopold of Cothen, he cheerfully turned to secular music. A Lutheran by birth and persuasion, he composed the greatest Roman Catholic mass known to man. In London, he probably would have written Italian operas and English oratorios, but that is merely wild conjecture since he never set foot in any foreign land.

Bach traveled in a small radius from his birthplace. He went to Hamburg a couple of times, probably to hear the organist Georg B"ohm. He went to L"ubeck to hear Buxtehude and, it is conjectured, to apply for the organist's job there. (According to one story, Bach, then just 20, was put off by the stipulation that Buxtehude's successor would have to marry his daughter, an old lady of 30.) He went to Halle, Handel's birthplace, to audition for the organist's job, and was rejected. Three years before his death he even made the trip from Leipzig to the Prussian court at Potsdam, about 85 miles by crow flight, at the invitation of Frederick the Great, himself a flutist and dilettante composer. The king, excited at the arrival of ''old Bach,'' had him improvise on a royal theme and try out several newfangled Silbermann pianos that the palace had acquired. Bach apparently did not record his reactions to the new instrument, but that may have been because he was too busy to bother: He went home and wrote what must be considered the most impressive bread-and-butter note in history. The ''Musical Offering,'' a gift to Frederick, was one of the few works printed in its entirety during Bach's lifetime.

Compared to Handel, Bach led a placid life. Nevertheless, the Leipzig cantor, too, had a reputation for prickliness. As a few documents show, he stood up to his church superiors with gumption when his musical standards were threatened. Early on, at least, he showed he could be pugnacious when crossed. He once was surrounded and threatened by six fellow students, one of whose talent as a bassoonist he had maligned. (Bach had called him a ''nannygoat,'' which is about as cruel a remark as you could make about a reed player.) After being hit in the face with a stick, young Bach settled the argument by drawing his sword. Unlike the bachelor Handel, Bach took wives, two of them, and as every writer must point out, had 20 children. What is less often mentioned is that Bach's life was veiled in tragedy. In those days, of course, early death was common. Still, what must it have been like for an artist of Bach's sensibilities to live in almost constant mourning? His first wife died, and by the time of his own death in 1750 only nine of his 20 children were alive. His second wife, Anna Magdalena, died in poverty 10 years later, even though by that time several of the sons were already famous musicians on their own.

Whereas Handel's reputation was on the rise when he died, Bach was already an anachronism, acknowledged as a fine organist but condescended to as a composer. He was thought of as a pedantic keeper of the contrapuntal flame in a time when people wanted music to break away from the dry old Baroque formalities. Handel, faced with the disastrous collapse of the Italian opera vogue in London, had turned to the more accessible genre of the English-language oratorio. Bach did not have that kind of temperament, though he could be surprisingly flexible at times. He could write in a simple, accessible style when he chose - any of the four orchestral suites, for instance, can be played on a pop concert program without confusing anyone - but as he grew older he also grew increasingly insistent on summing up what he and his predecessors had known about music. His ''Well- Tempered Clavier,'' ''Art of the Fugue'' and ''Musical Offering'' must have seemed like museum exhibits to most of his contemporaries.

Luckily for him, and for music listeners as well, Bach's grandest choral works cannot be played to death. By their nature they are saved from the fate of the ''Messiah,'' a work whose very greatness has doomed it to be a musical Mona Lisa. The ''St. Matthew Passion'' and the B-minor Mass simply demand too much of both audiences and performers ever to become everyday concert fare. Most of the cantatas are known only to devotees even now. The greater Bach still does not move in wide circles and probably never will. His music is famous, sometimes even familiar, but not quite popular. That kind of success might not have satisfied Handel, whose whole career was geared to the theater and popular acclaim, but it is one more way in which the icons from Halle and Eisenach can be told apart.

If you want to believe the difference makes Bach the greater composer of the two, go right ahead. Even some musicians will agree with you. Myself, I am firmly of two minds on the question.

By Donal Henahan

What is the connection, if any, between music and spoken or written language? That looks like a simple enough question, but theoreticians have been wrestling with it for centuries without pinning it to the mat. The late Deryck Cooke made a valiant start in ''The Language of Music,'' but his theories, tentative and arguable to begin with, did not pretend to extend beyond Western music of a traditional, tonal sort. Leonard Bernstein, who always can be depended upon to ride off on some quixotic quest, also tried to confront the issue in a series of talks at Harvard in 1976 but only managed to stir up resentment in both musical and linguistic circles with his attempt to apply Noam Chomsky's theories of transformational-generative grammar to music. The heat that his arguments generated on all sides suggested that Mr. Bernstein had taken up a larger subject than he could swallow, but he was chewing at a problem that, as a composer and practical musician, he knew to be a real one.

I found myself thinking of the music-language issue the other evening while listening to the New York Philharmonic perform Witold Lutoslawski's Symphony No. 3. This is a recent (1983) work by the Polish composer, who with Krzysztof Penderecki led the charge of the Eastern European avant-gardists after World War II, but on the surface it presents few problems to the listener. Despite its occasional use of quarter-tones, its interludes of controlled chance and its harshly percussive sonorities, the score goes down fairly easily. Purely as sound, that is, Mr. Lutoslawski's symphony is not only unobjectionable but at times so ingeniously wrought as to arouse wonder at its failure to attempt something more ambitious.

What puzzled me was the composer's apparent reluctance or inability to make the essential points of his argument clear, to persuade me that his piece had either meaningful shape or emotional impact. Now, I am aware that ''meaning'' and ''emotion'' are fighting words in 20th-century music, but let them stand. From a study of the score and more particularly from reading the composer's notes I know that he had a structure in mind - a ''preparatory'' movement followed by one with ''allusions to the sonata-allegro'' form with its contrast of themes - but he works too diligently to obscure even that simple design. At the end, I was left with the feeling that I had heard this work a thousand times in the last 40 years under one name or another. Such works decline to speak any generally understood language, preferring either to construct private codes or to disdain the idea of communication entirely.

Of course, it is also risky nowadays to use words such as ''message'' and ''communication,'' which can be sneered at as shibboleths from an era when even sophisticated people talked as if music were a kind of invisible telegraph wire between the composer and the listener. But the 20th-century notion that composing music is about the manipulation of abstract materials, no more, is at least as naive and, as ought to be evident by now, far less productive. The present-day listener can find passing interest in sonorities for their own sake, in rhythmic complexities or in mathematical games, but shouldn't he be forgiven for wishing to take away something more than that from a musical experience? I am not talking here of any specific style of modern composition, whether tonal, atonal, Serial, aleatoric or minimalist, but of a fault in musical logic that runs deep beneath the thinking of far too many composers.

What if, to be plain about it, the lost ingredient in the training of young composers today should turn out to be nothing more arcane than the study of rhetoric and grammar. That's right, the science of putting words and thoughts together in logical, persuasive and meaningful ways. There was a time - and it was a fruitful time - when it was taken for granted by the most respected theorists that music was an exalted form of speech and that to be convincing a composition had to follow certain classical rules of rhetoric. In an article in the Winter issue of the American Scholar entitled ''Bach the Rhetorician,'' Otto L. Bettmann argues that Bach specifically relied on those rules to shape his works, not only in language-inspired works such as the cantatas and passions but, more surprisingly, in such a seemingly abstract masterpiece as ''The Musical Offering.'' Mr. Bettmann, the founder of the Bettmann Archive, cites research by the musicologist Ursula Kirkendahl, who demonstrated that Bach followed ''to the minutest detail precepts developed by Quintilian [the Roman teacher and rhetorician] in his ''De Institutio Oratoria.'' According to Kirkendahl, ''The various pieces represent the successive sections of an oration. Bach writes no more and no fewer than those prescribed by Quintilian . . . and in proper order . . . His imitation is not limited to vague or chance elements - it is very concrete and systematic, extending even to the smallest detail.''

All right, but couldn't this preoccupation of Bach's have been merely a quirk of the moment, one of those arbitrarily chosen crutches that composers have always used in structuring their works? No, says Mr. Bettmann, Bach's commitment to the specific tenets of classical rhetoric was so basic to his composing method that when he was attacked by one of the leading music critics of the day, Johann Adolph Scheibe, he called on a professor of rhetoric at Leipzig University, Johann Abraham Birnbaum, to defend him. Birnbaum wrote that Bach ''so perfectly understood the resemblance of a musical piece with rhetoric . . . that he was listened to with the utmost satisfaction and pleasure when he discoursed on the similarity and agreement between the two . . . .'' Bach's own definition of the fugue, his most characteristic way of thinking in music, is revealing: A fugue is a polite conversation, he told his students, consisting not of words, but of voices, at times in dispute but in the end returning in harmony to the initial thesis. ''It is this circularity -the return to the beginning - that gives the fugue an effect both affirmative and consoling,'' Mr. Bettmann argues. ''When listening to Bach, one is never lost. However daring the flight of imagination, however complex the journey, Bach's music always brings us home.'' The same result, he adds, is achieved by the skilled writer who leaves us, not with a bundle of disjointed ideas, but with a valid conclusion. Or, every writer would hope, at least the appearance of one.

Bach was a child of the Enlightenment, a time when it was widely believed that all problems of life and art could be solved by rational thought. In 1985 we no longer can be comforted by such an idea, but isn't it strange that Bach's music continues to satisfy a need in us for order, continuity, balance, logical argument, the drama of conflicting ideas and an eventual return home. Not all great music, of course, is or needs to be organized as logically as a Bach fugue. Bach himself seems to have used nonrhetorical methods in constructing some pieces. There are scholarly industries devoted to showing his concerns with numerology, to his love of the most literal kind of picture painting in tone and to the tradition of hermeneutics, or biblical interpretation. It was entirely natural to him, for instance, to write a musical passage referring to the Cross in that very shape, even though the symbol could be detected only by the eye, not the ear.

Granted, some great music has been organized along literary lines but with little apparent resort to rhetorical argument. Operas depend on their librettos for shape and direction, ballets on their scenarios, tone poems on their texts, actual or implied. There are meaningful works that speak in seemingly casual phrases, like a letter. Composers have employed such forms as the sonnet, the sestina, the political address and, naturally, the sermon. Beethoven made profitable use of a Schiller ode, Schubert of Muller's poetry, Copland of Lincoln's speeches. One musicologist, Arnold Schering, has gone so far as to contend that behind every Beethoven work lies a ''poetic idea'' that can be traced to a specific source such as Shakespeare or Goethe. That is a plausible idea carried too far, perhaps qualifying Schering as the father of what Virgil Thomson called the the music-appreciation racket, which has managed to make all allusions to literature suspect by peddling music's worst myths in the form of program notes.

Late in the last century, in reaction to such excesses, the idea of tying music to language began to fall into general disrepute. Each composer took to inventing his own structural rules, his own formal crutches, and the audience was virtually dared to penetrate the mystery. And for several exciting decades, music did seem to be evolving in promising directions. For the last four decades or so, however, it has become harder and harder to believe that, as composers have worked with ever greater zeal at segregating themselves from a public that feels jilted and long ago stopped worrying about its failure to understand most new music.

And yet if we keep Bach in mind there may a glimmering hope. The idea that the structure of meaningful music and the structure of meaningful language both somehow reflect the same underlying reality refuses to go away. In any event, it still gives me a good feeling when a composition seems to have a logical beginning, middle and end. If that constitutes a ''message,'' well, let it be.

By Donal Henahan

The New York City Opera has a new star: a lady of formidable stature and irresistible charm who stole the show last night at the opening of Prokofiev's ''Love for Three Oranges.'' A 30-foot-high prima donna created by Maurice Sendak, the production's designer, this hugely appealing creature played the fat role of the Cook with relish, scoring one of the season's truly gargantuan hits.

Although legs and arms could be seen protruding from her ovens, this was an ogre with an eye for pretty things, one who could melt at the sight of an ''adorable'' ribbon waved by the captured jester Trouffaldino. She herself was no less adorable, rolling fearsome and yet fetching eyes, arching eyebrows, licking lips with an enormous tongue, stirring two pots simultaneously with two great wooden spoons, and in general doing all that any opera star could to enchant an audience. Her voice was, thanks to Wilbur Pauley's boomingly amplified bass, aptly gigantic. She is Mr. Sendak's Galatea, a creation he should be proud of.

This Cook, you see, guards three oranges in Creonte's kitchen that the Prince (Rico Serbo) has fallen in love with and must try to steal, as a result of a spell cast over him by the wicked witch Fata Morgana. The Prince got himself into this fix in the first place by laughing at the witch when her skirt fell down - but that is all of the plot's subtleties you will get from me. Frank Corsaro has staged Prokofiev's eccentric work with justifiable license and a crazed humor, taking his themes from commedia dell' arte, burlesque and vaudeville. Most of his devices are as aged as the commedia tradition itself, but who cares. The stage is in a continual frenzy of activity, what with a platoon of slapstick comedians (who actually wield slapsticks), people climbing ladders into balconies, tumblers and jugglers keeping the entertainment going and a stage audience contributing critical remarks and throwing fruit at the actors when provoked.

The production's basic concept, too, is anything but new: a play within an opera as in ''Pagliacci'' or ''Ariadne auf Naxos,'' with a fussing stage manager coming and going, and actors who blow lines and miss cues. There also are fantastic animals that could grow only in the fevered imagination of Mr. Sendak. Fata Morgana, at her first manifestation, slowly blows up into a balloon figure that could figure in a Macy's parade.

Singing is never seriously to the point in ''The Love for Three Oranges.'' However, Christopher Keene conducted the score with appropriate bite and never let things get too raucous. Mr. Serbo was a sweet-voiced Prince and he clowned nicely with his princess, Diana Walker, in their grand pas de deux. Hardly anyone in the huge cast fell short, however. John Lankston was an agile Trouffaldino and Stanley Wexler skulked convincingly as the dark villain Leandre. Other strong contributors to the night's fun were Robert Brubaker as Pantalon, Richard McKee as the King, William Dansby as Tchelio and Jane Shaulis as Princess Clarice.

As usual, Mr. Corsaro makes a bid for political relevance, setting the opera not in Prokofiev's ''imaginary kingdom,'' but in a French town during the Revolution. The singers are members of a touring troupe, the Theatre Tiepolo, whose efforts the noisy audience are none too happy with. As usual, too, Mr. Corsaro touches up the libretto in small and large ways. It should not be necessary in so freely treated a production, for instance, to put the ugly servant Smeraldine (Cynthia Rose) in blackface. And not much is really added at the end by having the villains spirited away by a female revolutionary carrying a small guillotine. In the original, Fata Morgana handles the escape quite well, and that ending is no shaggier than Mr. Corsaro's. Anyway, why struggle to make sense of ''The Love for Three Oranges,'' when fairy-tale grotesqueness and nonsense are so much to the opera's point?

The Cast:

THE LOVE FOR THREE ORANGES, opera in a prologue and three acts by Sergei Prokofiev; libretto by the composer after the comedy of Carlo Gozzi. Christopher Keene, conductor; Frank Corsaro, director; Maurice Sendak, sets and costumes. New production, originally created for the Glyndebourne Festival in England. Performed by the New York City Opera at the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center. The Prince: Rico Serbo Ninette: Diana Walker Fata Morgana: Joyce Castle Princess Clarice: Jane Shaulis Leandre: Stanley Wexler Cook: Wilbur Pauley Linetta: Jane Bunnell Truffaldino: John Lankston Farfarello: Jack Harrold Smeraldine: Cynthia Rose Master of Ceremonies: James Clark King of Clubs: Richard McKee Tchelio: William Dansby Pantalon: James Billings Herald: Joseph McKee

By Donal Henahan

Hildegard Behrens is an incomplete singer, technically, who by her ability to commit herself to every piece of music she takes in hand consistently manages to persuade the listener that she is a complete artist. Best known for her Wagnerian performances, in which her gleaming high notes and fervent declamation of the text can carry the day, the soprano has been broadening her outlook in recent years. Last season, you may recall, she made a brave try at Tosca with the Metropolitan Opera, a venture that exposed her lack of an Italianate legato, among other vocal necessities. She also gave the Metropolitan a memorably strong and touching Marie in ''Wozzeck,'' an ideal role for her voice and temperament.

However, we tend to think of Hildegard Behrens in terms of Wagner, and we may not be wrong. Her performance of the ''Wesendonck Lieder'' last evening at Carnegie Hall with the Orchestra of St. Luke's, deftly conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, was a triumph of art over craft. Her tone was not especially sensuous, which ought to be a drawback in this most sensuous of song cycles, but her reading of Mathilde Wesendonck's fevered poetry could not have been more pointed and sensitive. She had to simulate a wispy high pianissimo in ''Im Treibhaus,'' but did so expertly. More important than any vocal drawbacks, however, was the feeling that Miss Behrens was inside each song, living it to the utmost until, with the drugged rapture of ''Traume,'' singer and orchestra seemed to melt into one indivisible body. Mr. Thomas supported the singer admirably, particularly in the sustained languor of the postludes.

In prospect, one might have thought that ''Ah! Perfido!'' would suit Miss Behrens at least as well as the Wagner, since Beethoven's grand concert scena often calls for an outpouring of tone that only a genuine dramatic soprano can hope to produce. In the event, however, the Beethoven recitative and aria were both uneven vocally, though Miss Behrens declaimed the opening section with an actress's instinct for the sense of the words and threw out the aria's upper notes with lance-like accuracy and power. Her lower register did not project well and sounded effortful. This is a piece that in its final pages offers a stiff test of the voice's suppleness, but Miss Behrens could only slur over the scale passages.

Granted all that, the Beethoven turned out to be dramatically gripping. The soprano made her hurt and anger at the perfidious lover painfully evident in the recitative, but softened her approach in the aria enough so that her ''Per pieta'' became a pitiable cry that went to the heart of Beethoven's brief drama.

Mr. Thomas, who despite some fey mannerisms that have been part of his baggage since his early days, has developed into a marvelously satisfying conductor. In addition to his thoughtful collaboration with Miss Behrens, he led the St. Luke's ensemble in light-footed, rhythmically alive performances of Mozart's Symphony No. 34 in C (K. 338) and Beethoven's Symphony No. 4. The orchestra, about half the number of a full symphonic group (the right size for these Classical pieces, in fact), played works stylishly. If this concert was a fair sample of what the Orchestra of St. Luke's does regularly, it is an organization whose fortunes should be on the rise.

By Donal Henahan

Nine seasons is an inexcusably long time for any opera company to go without a performance of ''Le Nozze di Figaro,'' but the Metropolitan made amends Friday evening with a new production of the Mozart masterpiece. Partial amends, at any rate; Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's clever but enormous sets worked only sometimes, often succeeding in dwarfing one of opera's most intimate works and diminishing the effect of several highly respectable individual performances.

The greatest strength of this performance lay in its pair of servant lovers, Kathleen Battle as Susanna and Ruggero Raimondi as Figaro, with Frederica von Stade's Cherubino and Carol Vaness's Countess adding vocal quality to a cast that had its weak spots. Miss Battle's spring-water soprano and pert acting were a delight all evening, and her last-act aria, ''Deh vieni, non tardar,'' caught Susanna's whole character in one affecting moment. James Levine, conducting his first ''Figaro'' in this house, gave her an especially expansive and sympathetic accompaniment here, and on the whole kept the score bubbling.

Mr. Raimondi, a particularly serious and full-voiced Figaro, sang with the ardor of a truly jealous man. He treated Cherubino like a rival, not a boy to be humored, and roughed up the young Lothario with unusual enthusiasm before marching him off to the army in ''Non piu andrai.''

Mr. Ponnelle's direction also made Cherubino a genuine threat to Count Almaviva, whose maltreated wife clearly found the boy a disturbing sexual presence. Perhaps Miss Vaness fluttered a bit too obviously at his advances, but the point was tellingly made. Miss Vaness did not disappoint vocally, though it is possible to prefer a warmer soprano than hers for ''Porgi amor'' and ''Dove sono,'' the Countess's great arias of nostalgia and introspection.

No singer was helped, however, by Mr. Ponnelle's decision to use almost the full depth and width of the Metropolitan's stage. When Miss Vaness began her ''Porgi amor'' in her bedroom, she lay on a bed that looked nearer to Amsterdam Avenue than to the audience. For ''Dove sono,'' she moved closer, thank you, but the sentiments in both arias were to some extent lost in the wide open spaces.

Mr. Ponnelle, as is his habit, framed the action with decaying classical pillars, between which there usually was an archway and a kind of tunnel from which characters came and went. This may have been meant to delimit the scenes, but if so it did not work. The most effective scene was the opening one, which put the future home of Figaro and Susanna closer to the footlights, under a stairway in what appeared to be a storeroom. In an amusing directorial touch, Figaro was first espied measuring, not the room, but first the makeshift bed and then his bride-to-be. Another bit of ingenuity had the house lights going up so that Figaro could harangue the audience with his angry ''Aprite un po' quegli occhi.'' An oddity that caught the eye, at least, was Cherubino's intermittent appearance in a disguise featuring a wig that made him look like Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion.

Thomas Allen's Count Almaviva looked the part, but did not sing it. His baritone sounded small in caliber at all times and did not project the bottom notes at all. Artur Korn as Bartolo and Michel Senechal as Basilio were assets. However, this production does not allow Basilio his last-act aria and, as usual, also cut that of Marcellina (Jocelyne Taillon) in the interests of propelling the drama to its comic though nearly tragic conclusion.

The Cast:

LE NOZZE DI FIGARO, opera in four acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte, after Beaumarchais. James Levine, conductor; production, sets and costumes designed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle; lighting designed by Gil Wechsler. Premiere of new production. At the Metropolitan Opera. Figaro: Ruggero Raimondi Susanna: Kathleen Battle Dr. Bartolo: Artur Korn Marcellina: Jocelyne Taillon Cherubino: Frederica von Stade Count Almaviva: Thomas Allen Don Basilio: Michel Senechal Countess Almaviva: Carol Vaness Antonio: James Courtney Don Curzio: Anthony Laciura Barbarina: Dawn Upshaw

By Donal Henahan

At the risk of beating a dead soprano, I must return to a matter I thought I had dispatched quietly in a recent piece: the stifling of Desdemona in the Metropolitan Opera's ''Otello.'' I should have known better. For some reason, this is the sort of discussion that sends normally quiescent readers flying to their writing desks, eager to agree or disagree, often at dissertational length. Who would have thought there were so many people out there with fervent, reasoned opinions on the subject of Otello's modus operandi? In the Met production, you recall, the death weapon was a pillow wielded by the crazed Moor, but I suggested that the libretto's simple stage direction, ''he stifles her,'' could be stretched to include more theatrically plausible possibilities, including strangling.

Doctors, of course, can be expected to hold firm views on such a matter and I heard from several. One, Dr. M. Eugenia Geib, was reminded of an inquest she held in Opera News, Feb. 2, 1952, on several operatic corpses, including ''some cases in which the librettist's diagnosis is scarcely tenable.'' Noting that Desdemona is supposedly strangled or smothered, the doctor wonders how this could be true: ''It is a well-known fact that the brain cells are most susceptible to oxygen lack; the smothered individual becomes irrational, then unconscious. Finally, the vital centers of the brain are affected, causing cessation of heartbeat.

''The difficulty in accepting Desdemona as a simple case of strangulation is that she regains consciousness and speaks a few coherent words. Obviously, her brain cells are not destroyed at all. Since Otello does not restrangle her, it can scarcely be believed that she dies of oxygen lack caused by simple mechanical obstruction. It is true that in some cases the obstruction is caused not by the hands of the strangler, but by intense swelling of the throat secondary to to fracture of the bones of the larynx. However, an outstanding feature of such cases is extreme difficulty in vocalizing, and the Metropolitan does not generally present Desdemonas who have that trouble. We must assume then that she dies of some other condition, probably a cerebral hemorrhage or a heart attack, no doubt brought on by the assault.''

I almost hesitate to point out another possibility, that a soprano might suffer serious loss of brain cells, perhaps at birth, and still enjoy a career at the Metropolitan.

A Plainfield, N. J., physician, Dr. Richard M. Ball, alluding to Desdemona's prolonged ''two- phase death,'' points out that ''alas, such antemortem stamina is common in opera. But it is usually after poison, stabbing or shooting. These are believably less instantaneous deaths, so the listener can keep the poetic faith. But suffocation? No way. Your suggestion that manual throttling rather than the pillow might be more acceptable won't work either. Strangling crushes the hyoid bone, blood fills the windpipe (accounting for the so-called 'death gurgle'), and rapid swelling seals off respiration. There'd be not even a wisp of air, to say nothing of a sustained legato.

''So what shall the forensic pathologist cum operatic stage director do? I suggest both stifle and stab. Otello already has a dagger in his doublet. Let him use it twice; other operatic murderers have done it. Desdemona begs for another night, an hour, an instant. Otello, enraged, stifles (Shakespeare's word) her mewling with the pillow, (which hides her face, too; Otello is something of a coward, after all), then he stabs her, and throws off the pillow, revealing a pre-bloodstained underside to the audience. Since Desdemona is exsanguinating, and not suffocating, she can sing now and die later. This preserves the original soffocare , while not shattering medical reality.''

I reproduce Dr. Ball's clinical solution to the problem not only for whatever medical light it may throw, but as a fine example of how close to the surface in all confirmed operagoers lies the stage-directing impulse. I know that I, for one, often feel the urge during a performance to call a halt to some silliness onstage and offer my own astute ideas of how the scene should go.

Along that line, a Shelter Island reader named Anna Marie (surname not quite decipherable) offers her own X-rated vision of the scene: ''I would rather propose a less preposterous desmise for Desdemona, one which would undoubtedly allow for a few strangled notes of anguish/ delight . . . that here la soffoca means that Othello tries to take and smother her with his love - and succeeds.'' It just might work, I believe, on late- night TV.

Gary Smidgall, an English teacher at the University of Pennsylvania points out that the composer and his librettist were merely following Shakespeare in letting Desdemona live on after her stifling. ''After all, it was his and not Verdi's and Boito's bright idea not to have her die 'straight off,' as you put it. In the play, 30 lines after she is smothered she comes back - momentarily resurrects - for her last Christian gesture of selfless giving. Bardolatrous M.D.'s assure us this is all medically possible, but I don't think S. gave a damn. He expected the tremendous effect of the gesture was worth the risk of the 'picky' few not swept along by it all.''

Jane Sherman of New Paltz, N.Y., also wants it understood that Verdi and Boito followed Shakespeare closely in letting Desdemona revive briefly in the death scene. ''As for your suggestion that Emilia, Iago, Cassio and Ludovico should rush to try to save Desdemona, in the play she dies before Emilia has had time really to see what happened. And not for two pages of dialogue with Othello does she then call in the others, who could hardly be expected to apply to a thoroughly dead lady 'whatever cardio-pulmonary resuscitation techniques were known in 16th-century Cyprus.' ''

From even deeper in the literary archives comes Kelly Graham's note of amplification: ''It is commonly believed that Shakespeare based his 'Othello' on Giraldi Cinthio's seventh novella of the third day of the 'Hecatomonithi' (1566). This novella was supposedly taken from an actual Venetian murder in which a woman was beaten to death by pillows filled with sand by her husband and his ensign. The sand-filled pillows were used so that no bruises would show on her body. The husband and ensign then arranged for the beams of the woman's bedroom to fall upon her so that the entire incident would seem to be an accident. Perhaps this Venetian source explains the Metropolitan's production as well as the production you saw in which the bed fell upon Desdemona and Otello.'' Perhaps, indeed.

Yet another Shakespearean, Donald Roemer of Lexington, Mass., rises to defend Verdi and Boito (neither of whom I accused of anything) but goes on to agree with me on one point, citing ''the grievous error perpetrated when Desdemona lumbers down from the platform, flaps around the room, and then has somehow to be maneuvered back to the bed, where she is supposed to die. She should stay there and take her medicine.'' Apropos of ''Otello,'' Mr. Roemer fondly recalls a 1960 performance at an East German house where the Desdemona, a towering soprano bearing the first name of Brunnhilde, got out of bed, wrestled a small tenor to the death and would have won easily if the libretto had allowed her to. The tenor then had to drag the enormous body back onto the bed. Emilia entered and, as the performance was being sung in German, uttered her horrified judgment on Otello: ''Dumbkopf!''

An actress, Eugenia Rawls, who portrays the 19th-century actress Fanny Kemble in one-woman shows, provides further insight into the question by sending along a letter that Fanny wrote just before playing Shakespeare's Desdemona for the first time: ''That smothering scene is most extremely horrible. I think I shall make a desperate fight of it, for I feel most horribly at the idea of being murdered in my bed. The Desdemonas that I have seen on the English stage have always appeared to me to acquiesce with wonderful equanimity to their assassination. On the Italian stage they run for their lives around the bedroom, their Othello clutching them finally by the hair of the head, and then murdering them. But I did think I should not like to be murdered, and therefore at rehearsal got up on my knees, on my bed, and threw my arms tight around Othello's neck (having previously warned Mr. Macready, and begged his pardon for the liberty), that being my notion of the poor creature's last appeal for mercy.''

So perhaps in the end, the trouble I had in suspending disbelief in that last scene of the Metropolitan's ''Otello'' was merely that it had an English Desdemona and an Italian director. At least there were no such serious distractions as those mentioned in a note I received from a fellow critic: ''At the first performance, belief was put to an even harder suspension test: the public so much admired Otello's entrance (the double-bass passage and attendant pantomime) that it was encored! The records don't tell us whether a stagehand first came on to relight the candle he extinguishes during his advance to the bed.''

And on that historical note, let the whole subject be stifled.