There is a convenient fiction maintained by all but the most fervent postmodernist concerning the interpretation of opera: that the music somehow reveals how a particular drama should be played out on the stage. Whether a reading (or a production) is supposedly authentic, traditional or modernist in intent and delivery, support is invoked for it within the musical score by assuming a clarity in the semiotic play of signifier and signified that in turn validates our various responses to opera as drama. We know an aria signifying ‘love’, ‘triumph’, ‘rage’ or ‘lament’ when we hear one, and we respond accordingly, indeed conventionally to the extent that we often focus less on what is being sung about than on how it is being sung. And whether or not one agrees with Joseph Kerman's battle-cry ‘In opera, the dramatist is the composer’, the notion of the composer as musician-orator, persuading and moving at will, is a powerful one, reinforcing deep-seated beliefs concerning the transcendental truths about the human condition conveyed by the canon of operatic masterpieces. It is also a trope adopted early in the history of opera. When the unknown librettist of Claudio Monteverdi's Le nozze d'Enea in Lavinia (1641; now lost) praised its composer for he was not only invoking a topos drawn from classical antiquity; he was also affirming an aesthetic stance that retains its fascination even today.

Because of its bearing on his freelance career, the question of private patronage in Vienna during the 1780s is of great interest to Mozart scholarship. Serious investigation into this question, however, has been hampered by a lack of sources. The chief source to date has been the Mozart correspondence, especially Wolfgang's letter of 20 March 1784 to his father, in which he lists the subscribers to his forthcoming concert series. Another valuable source exists in the Zinzendorf diaries, which, although often dipped into, have not been systematically examined for their potential in this regard. My recent transcription of all the passages in the diaries that deal with theatre and music in Vienna from Easter 1783 to Easter 1792 includes the private entertainments of the nobility in whose circles Zinzendorf moved. These are summarized in Appendix 1, which forms the basis of the present discussion.

Those familiar with Herman Melville's last novella, published posthumously in 1924 and entitled Billy Budd, Foretopman, will know that one of the most memorable scenes is in fact barely there. In the so-called ‘missing’ scene, all that readers know with any certainty is that Edward Fairfax Vere, captain of the warship Indomitable (later editions rename the ship Bellipotent), communicates to Billy Budd, a sailor, the verdict of a drumhead court. Billy is to die in the early hours of the following morning for the crime of striking and killing the master-at-arms, the malevolent John Claggart. Precisely what passes between Vere and Billy in the crucial scene — one pivotal for the denouement of the story — has remained for ever a literary mystery. Although the narrator provides some conjecture as to what may have happened in the compartment where Billy is held, all he can say for sure, in a sentence endlessly cited by Melville's critics, is ‘Beyond the communication of the sentence, what took place at this interview was never known.’