Cherubino’s love song from The Marriage of Figaro

Cherubino’s love song from The Marriage of Figaro is a recurring musical motif through which the novel connects Willie’s first sustained musical exchange with May Wynn to later scenes of listening, memory, and separation. The aria’s passage between Mozart’s music and a jazzed-up parody mirrors the scene’s own shifts in tone; when it returns in Willie’s room and travels with him as a record, the music carries the intimacy of his time with May into the choices that take him away from her.

The Arrangement and Performance

The aria first appears as part of an ambitious arrangement that begins with Cherubino’s song in Italian, interrupts it midway with a syncopated parody in clumsy English, and then returns to Mozart’s music and Da Ponte’s words. The singer tells Willie to watch for the break, and he accompanies the piece on a battered, yellowing piano keyboard scarred by cigarette burns. The arrangement’s change of register is not merely a musical joke: it sets the composed beauty of the original against an exaggerated nightclub routine, then lets the song settle back into its earlier manner.

Willie knows the aria by heart, and Mozart’s music is among the few things that affect him deeply. His long experience of opera-going also shapes his response to May’s singing. He recognizes that she has neither a great voice nor a professional technique; what distinguishes her performance is the pleasure she takes in singing. She pronounces the Italian correctly and appears to understand the words, giving the original passages a freshness that the novel contrasts with polished performance. The song’s appeal, for Willie, lies partly in that unforced quality.

The contrast becomes visible during the parody. May moves into the conventional pose of a nightclub singer, exaggerates her gestures and expression, adopts a Southern accent, and pushes the chorus into a broad comic performance. The narrative says that this persona obliterates her charm. When the arrangement returns to Mozart, she returns as well to an easy, unstudied manner, leaning against the piano with her hands in her coat pockets as she sings the falling end of the song. Willie plays the final echo with regret. The aria thus gives the scene a clear emotional turn: the display that briefly distances him from May gives way to the natural ease that draws him back.

A Shared Musical Moment

The performance also establishes a form of closeness that does not depend on a declaration. As Willie plays, May leans against the piano, one hand hanging near his eyes; the roughness at her knuckles suggests the work of dishwashing. Her brief gesture of plucking an imaginary guitar accompaniment adds casual humor to the scene. These details place musical knowledge and ordinary labor side by side: she knows how to guide Willie through the arrangement, but her hands also bear evidence of practical work. The aria lets him attend to her as both a capable musician and a person whose charm is distinct from the part she performs for the comic break.

The melody changes the atmosphere around them. It fills the gloomy cellar with radiance, and a blonde woman leaving through the door turns back to listen. Willie looks up at May and smiles while playing; she returns his smile before directing him into the syncopated section. Their exchange is made of timing, glances, and musical cues. The song’s alternation between Italian aria and comic parody structures their encounter, but it also lets them share a small act of coordination: she marks the break, and he follows her into it.

From the Room to the Record

The aria returns after the encounter as music Willie plays at three o’clock in the morning. His mother wakes from a vivid dream that she is at the opera, then realizes that the music she hears is real and coming from Willie’s room. She finds him in his shirt sleeves beside his portable phonograph, with a pad and pencil in hand. He looks guilty and switches off the machine when she asks whether he is playing records at that hour. The scene turns the aria into a domestic sound: what had been a shared performance in the cellar now crosses a hallway and interrupts the night, prompting his mother to mistake it at first for music from her dream.

Later, in San Francisco, Willie finds the record among the few items in his valise. May recorded the aria for him in a Broadway shop one night when they were both giddy with champagne. Holding it, he recalls the April evenings they spent together during his ten days of leave and imagines how perfectly the evening would suit May’s voice and Mozart’s music. The record is one of two mementos from his last hours in New York; the other is a letter from his father. The aria therefore survives as a tangible reminder as well as a remembered sound, carried into a new city and a different stage of Willie’s life.

Separation and Recurrence

The record sharpens the conflict between Willie’s feeling for May and his plan to end their relationship. He reaches for the telephone, then withdraws his hand when he remembers that it is nearly midnight in the Bronx. He tells himself that he is giving May up because he cannot marry her and that she should not be kept waiting. His intended method is silence: after an ecstatic farewell, he plans neither to write nor to answer letters, hoping the relationship will die away. May has not been told of this plan. Against that resolve, the aria recalls the closeness he is trying to leave behind. Its recurrence does not resolve their separation; instead, the record makes the emotional cost of his decision present in the room with him.

Across these appearances, the aria moves from live exchange, to nighttime listening, to an object Willie carries away. Its musical return to Mozart after the parody finds a parallel in the return of May’s voice in his memory: both restore a tenderness that the comic performance and his planned silence cannot entirely displace. The song binds scenes that would otherwise be separated by place and time, making music a record of attachment even as Willie attempts to let the relationship fade.