IT ONLY HURTS WHEN YOU THINK . . .

Never underestimate the corruptive potential of the loftiest muse.

Salzburg, the picturesque Austrian town that plays host to an ultra-expensive, sophisticated, international music festival in the summertime, plays host to low-priced, provincial, garden-variety opera and concerts in the winter. The summer indulgences are aimed at wealthy tourists. The winter fare is designed to enlighten, enrich and entertain the burghers. But there are limits.

The local opera company recently did something daring. It staged Puccini’s “Tosca.” The sage politicos of the City Council, alas, didn’t like it. In fact, they were shocked.

They weren’t shocked, we hasten to add, by the torture scene, the attempted-rape scene, or the murder of Scarpia. They weren’t shocked by or evil lechery of the baron who serves as police chief. They weren’t shocked by the execution of the idealistic hero in the last act.

But they were shocked, jawohl , when two school inspectors and a child psychiatrist reported that Tosca, the heroine who lives for art, kisses her lover in church--smack in front of a statue of the Madonna.

The brief operatic embrace, it was ruled, “could damage the spiritual and psychological and moral development” of children younger than 10. Therefore, the cautious council president decided, parents who bring children younger than 10 to this opera at the Festspielhaus will be fined heavily.

E avanti a lui tremava tutto Salisburgo. . . .

The resident arbiter of all things pure, holy and harmonious is grateful to a faithful reader, Robert Bookman, for bringing the following revolutionary news flash to editorial attention.

Remember speed reading? Now, we have progressed, in this wondrous age of modern technology, to speed listening.

Stanley Takese, president of the VSC Corp. in San Francisco, has come up with a gadget that plays music at the proper pitch and tempo for the man in a hurry. Without too much distortion, we are assured, the machine of the future (now available) can perform sonic miracles. For instance, it can play Chopin’s “Minute” Waltz in 44 seconds.

Imagine what speed listening could do for Wagner’s “Ring” or for the symphonies of Bruckner. It boggles the mind, and ears.

Takese has good reason to be proud of his product. “Time,” he reminds us, “is money.”

The hours creep on apace, and tempus fugit.

According to Italian critic Luigi Mazzi, the legendary Paris Opera House has sold out to the engineers in the sound booth. In a review of a recent production of Gluck’s noble “Alceste” in the French capital, Mazzi bemoans the use of a system euphemistically called “sonorization.” The Grand Opera apparently has stooped low enough to introduce electronic amplification, despite the relatively small size (by U.S. standards) of the hall and despite its oft-vaunted acoustic splendor.

The Paris Opera, in other words, sounds these days just like the Hollywood Bowl. No wonder Ernest Fleischmann was tempted.

A microphone is a microphone is a microphone . . . .

Meanwhile in Vienna, Ken Russell has invaded the Staatsoper. The enfant terrible who gave the world such portentous films as “The Boy Friend,” “Lisztomania,” “Mahler,” “Tommy,” “The Music Lovers” and “Valentino” has had his way with Gounod’s defenseless “Faust.”

Among other innovations, the ever-inventive director decided that Marguerite (Gabriela Benackova-Cap) should be a nun who communicates via sign language with deaf children in the care of Nurse Marthe Schwertlein. As if that weren’t enough irreverence and/or irrelevance, Russell added some action to the church scene that required the subtle Mephistopheles (Ruggero Raimondi) to urinate in the holy water.

For some reason, the Viennese first-nighters booed the guest from the silver screen at post-performance curtain calls. He, in turn, turned his back on the crowd when he took his bows.

Meine Ruh’ ist hin . . . .

Luciano Pavarotti came of age--50, to be exact--on Oct. 12.

Now, perhaps, he can survive a little horror movie called “Yes, Giorgio” with impunity. He can open the Met season as a lazy, overstuffed yet narcissistic Cavaradossi in “Tosca” with audiences shouting approval and critics crying foul. He even can admit publicly that his fabled top voice isn’t what it used to be.

“I can still make the high C,” he claimed in a New York interview, “and if the conductor really insists, I will do it. But I prefer now to transpose.”

He also has reached the point, however, where his bigger-than-life all-embracing culture-for-the-masses image may overpower what remains of his artistry. After viewing a rather bizarre non-spectacular on PBS called “Pavarotti Plus,” Peter G. Davis summed up the phenomenon rather devastatingly in New York magazine:

”. . . as P. T. Barnum understood so well, we Americans have always had a soft spot for lovable grotesques, and in many respects Pavarotti carries on the tradition of such unlikely popular show-biz personalities as Tom Thumb and Jenny Lind, Tiny Tim and Liberace.”

Ahime!

Igor Stravinsky may have liked Los Angeles, but when it came to appreciation of his art, the feeling wasn’t exactly mutual. A neat reminder of his neglect in grand and official circles has materialized in the third volume of the composer’s “Selected Correspondence,” edited by--who else?--Robert Craft (Knopf: $35).

In a rather passionate letter to his publisher dated April 13, 1962, Stravinsky defends the Santa Fe Opera as the appropriate company to stage the premiere of “The Flood.”

“What,” he asks, “did the Metropolitan Opera do for me? Just the same as the Los Angeles Philharmonic--i.e., nothing!!!”

Ou sont les neiges . . . ?

The Germans always have deemed it worthwhile--perhaps even essential--to suffer for their art. Anyone who has wilted through marathon exposure to the heat and humidity inside the sacrosanct Bayreuth Festspielhaus during balmy Bavarian summers must know the feeling. Masochistic musical steam baths are best endured, it would seem, by Deutschland’s devout industrialists when they are decked out in heavy evening attire.

Time refuses to march on in the house that Richard Wagner built. This season an intrepid reporter asked Wagner’s grandson Wolfgang, current guardian of the Holy Grail, why the theatrical shrine couldn’t be air conditioned.

Wolfgang Wagner found the futuristic suggestion ignoble. “No technology today,” he sputtered, “is guaranteed to be silent.

“Furthermore, an opera like ‘Tannhaeuser’ would gobble up 11,000 marks (about $4,600) in energy costs in a single evening.”

The only people in the Festspielhaus who are unlikely to be unaffected by unkind atmospheric conditions, therefore, are the three naked sopranos who, as resident mermaids, swim in the pool that represents the Rhine in Sir Peter Hall’s misbegotten “Ring” production. All others must, as it were, sweat it out.

Good old Tristan expressed the problem nicely in his delirium: “O dieser Sonne, sengender Strahl, wie brennt mir das Hirn seine gluehende Qual!”

Andrew Porter’s excellent translation heart-renders it thus:

“O cruel sunlight, searing my brain, for me no escape from the burning and pain!”

Porter, in case you haven’t noticed, has a way with words. Occasionally, as in his review of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s second-hand “Requiem,” some patently subjective praise may strike a surprising object. “Master Miles-Kingston,” quoth Porter regarding the boy-soprano soloist, “has a sweet, slightly breathy treble and is of exquisite appearance.”

Beauty resides, of course, in the eye of the beholder. Other observers may have found Master Miles-Kingston to be just another pretty face.

Be that as it may, no thinking person can question Porter’s aesthetic when he casts his critical gaze away from the proscenium and into the auditorium. Last year, the resident British guardian of public virtue at the New Yorker waxed particularly eloquent after a performance of “Parsifal”:

“The first-night Met audience gave its own virtuoso performance, by sustaining a steady obbligato of open, unstifled coughing for over five hours. (Each passing hour was signaled by electronic beeping from unmuted wristwatches.) Seldom did two consecutive bars go by undisturbed by coughers, answering one another from side to side of the theatre, now high, now low, like farm dogs in the hills on a moonlit night.”

All the world’s a stage. . . .

The doublespeak quote of the year thus far--maybe of the century--comes from our favorite pioneering Xeroxed-arpeggio composer, Philip Glass. The supreme master of the profound doodledy-doodledy uttered this bit of deathless prose in a PBS documentary concerning his so-called opera, “Einstein on the Beach” (the sentence is to be read slowly and repeatedly, without expression):

“It doesn’t matter what it means as long as it’s meaningful.”

And every one will say, as you walk your mystic way, “If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me, why, what a singularly deep young man this deep young man must be!”