Words and Music

I turned on the radio yesterday to hear something in the Mozart Marathon on Radio 3 where all, yes, ALL the music Mozart ever wrote is being played over 12 days, and I heard a most beautiful soprano aria from an opera which, when I looked it up in the Radio Times, I found I had never heard of. I didn't know what she was singing about but the tone of it made me believe it was romanttic, maybe a love song; but it could have been a song to a person or maybe to something else, a pomegranet possibly. Don't know. Didn't care. The thing is, it didn't much matter what the song's words were saying because I was listening to the beautiful sound of the music.
This is often the case I think with a lot of people: they hear an aria from an opera, like what they hear but don't really care what it is about - Nessun Dorma for example: how many people at the World Cup, or whatever it was the aria was used as a signature tune to, knew what the words were describing.
I have just been reading how the song "Moon River" came to be written. Blake Edwards wanted a song for his film "Breakfast at Tiffany's"; Henry Mancini said he'd like to write one. "You're the music director," Edwards told him, "you don't write songs." But Manciini pleaded and he was tried out. He wrote a melody, a simple one that Audrey Hepburn would be able to manage, and got Johnny Mercer to write the lyrics. It workd a treat and won an oscar.
Fast forward a year or two and Miles Kreuger, musical historian, asked Mercer "What has moon river to do with hucklberry friend?" "D'you know, you're the only one who ever has asked me that?" Mercer didn't have a satisfactory answer. Sounded good. Still does. "My Huckleberry friend" is one of those magical expressions that sound great without making much sense in the context it's in.
Then there's Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns". Does anybody know exactly what that's about? Does Sondheim? He's never come clean on that. Then there's "A Whiter Shade of Pale". "We didn't know what we were singing," I once heard one of the group that recorded it say, "but it sounded real good."
A couple of days ago I heard a recording of Dame Janet Baker singing one of Elgar's Sea Songs: "Where corals lie." Great song. Beautiful voice. But she did not at first wish to sing it because she thought the poem wasn't up to scratch. Luckily she changed her mind. Possibly she realised that the words weren't the chief quality of the work: it's great Elgar and great Janet Baker but not probably a great poem.