Vulcanic barbers, faithless husbands, desperate wives, libidinous pages, drunk gardeners, rebellious chambermaids, scheming parents, lawyers: Put that way, it seems odd that watching such characters, even on Mozart's stage, would bring people pleasure. Odd, and also perhaps censurable. One strand of criticism, going back to Plato, holds that theatrical enjoyment coarsens our native sympathy, inures us to suffering, makes us mock virtue. That old objection has some contemporary authority in modernist responses to a Mozartean beauty, which must be resisted because it makes palatable some lie about the social, political world, where “music oft hath such a charm / to make bad good, and good provoke harm” (Measure for Measure, 4.1.14–15). But the dissent can go still deeper, to operate independently of any particular content. The problem is with representation itself. Clean up his indecencies (the way he incites fear of death or distrust of the gods, for example), and Plato would still demand that Homer cast everything in his own voice. When Homer speaks in the voice of Chryses, for example, he is lying (Republic, 393c).

The modernist resistance to representation is like that. An older poetics found in beauty at least a sign of a harmony between nature and freedom. The modernist, not thinking it possible to feel at home in the world, reconceives art's task as one of aiding in, making clearer, that naturally alienated state. There is a moral imperative in stopping our ears to beauty, or at least in lashing ourselves to the mast as we sail past it.

What is interesting is what happens when theoretical certitude about beauty's corrosiveness runs into the practical fact that few people are going to stop enjoying things like the conclusion to Figaro's mad day anytime soon. They might rather resent the censoriousness, or just scoff at it. Faced with this problem in the area of a modern, “experimental” poetry that is “hard to love,” apologists have, as Oren Izenberg notes, redescribed pleasure variously as “‘the fascination [of] what's difficult,’ the penetration of the veil of the esoteric, the masochistic pleasures of derangement, the politicized shock of estrangement, the tranquilizing or meditative dwelling in the ambient.”