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''Difficile lectu'', K. 559, is a canon composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The music, in F major, is set for three singers. The words are probably by Mozart himself.〔Preface to Neue Mozart Ausgabe edition (External link below)〕 The work was entered by the composer into his personal catalog on 2 September 1788 as part of a set of ten canons; it was probably written some time during the years 1786–87.〔Source: Preface to the NMA edition. The honoree of the canon, Johann Nepomuk Peierl (see below) lived in Vienna only between late 1785 and 1787.〕 ==Text== Although some of the canons in the 1788 set have serious (that is, religious) lyrics, K. 559 was evidently meant entirely for fun. The work features two bilingual puns and some scatological humor. The lyrics are—ostensibly—in Latin, though as they are given in sequence they do not make sense in this language: :''Difficile lectu mihi mars et jonicu difficile''. The humor of the work consists of hearing these words instead as vulgar phrases of German and Italian. The German pun is based on the strong Bavarian accent of the tenor-baritone Johann Nepomuk Peyerl (1761–1800),〔http://www.bmlo.lmu.de/p0297〕 who can be presumed to have been the lead singer in the first performance (see below). As Jean-Victor Hocquard points out, the pseudo-Latin lyrics ''lectu mihi mars'', as Peyerl would have sung them, resemble Bavarian German ''leck du mi im Arsch'',〔Hocquard (1999, 203)〕 which in a literal English rendering is "lick thou me in the arse". More idiomatically, the phrase could be translated "kiss my arse" (American English "kiss my ass").〔For discussion of the German idiom, see Leck mich im Arsch.〕〔Hocquard's explanation presumes a dialectal pronoun ''mi'' "me". Copeman and Scheer (1996, 262) note that the Latin pronoun ''mihi'' was sometimes pronounced by German singers as (:ˈmiçi), which would have been a good match for Standard German (:mɪç) ''mich''.〕 The second pun in the canon is based on the single Latin word ''jonicu''. Winternitz (1958) explains that when this word is sung repeatedly and rapidly, as in the canon, its syllables are liable to be heard rearranged as a taboo word of dialectal Italian, ''cujoni'', which means "balls, testicles", akin to Spanish ''cojones''. Michael Quinn writes, "Mozart clearly relished the incongruity resulting from ribald verse set as a canon, traditionally regarded as the most learned of all compositional techniques."〔Quinn (2007, 59)〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Difficile lectu」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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