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.

How old is music, and what are its most ancient forms? What is its origin, its source, and to whom shall we attribute its invention? Is music from man, from nature, or from God? Whom does it serve, in whose name is it sung? These are the questions that eighteenth-century writers asked themselves as they embarked on their histories of music; these are the questions they felt it necessary to answer on the first pages of their manuscripts. Today we have consigned the questions to comedy. Who but Barbra Streisand could fall in love with the professor who arrived at the congress of American musicologists with a suitcase filled with rocks that he claimed to be the earliest musical instruments? Innocent and unanswerable, the question ‘How did music begin?’ strikes us as childlike; it has fallen out of currency. In journalism, fiction, the testimony of musicians and composers, and in psychological and psychoanalytical literature, music's origin is still touched upon obliquely. Roland Barthes, inviting the postmodern reader ‘not [to] reject the delirium of origins’, proposes his own theory concerning certain ‘rhythmic incisions … on cave walls of the Mousterian epoch’ that point to ‘the intentional reproduction of a [musical] rhythm’. But the question of music's origin has vanished from histories of music. This being so, we might ask under what intellectual, institutional or professional circumstances the question was withdrawn: for a discourse on the origins of music continued to the middle of this century with the revised edition of the New Oxford History of Music.

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.

Joseph Addison's Spectator is perhaps the best-known early eighteenth-century periodical, its title a byword for the period's acute critical sensibility, its pages of enthusiastic enquiry a fitting monument to what we like to call the ‘Age of Reason’. Of the many commentaries on opera included in its pages, Spectator no. 5 (6 March 1711), critiquing the inadequacy of attempts at scenic verisimilitude on London's operatic stage, is justly renowned. Addison's tale of the undesirable (and wholly unmusical) results of releasing quantities of sparrows inside a theatre derives much of its pungency from the consequences of what Addison feels to be an improper juxtaposition of 'shadows and realities': sparrows and castrati alike escape pastoral fantasy to invade more sordid reality, penetrating ‘a lady's bed-chamber’ or perching ‘upon a king's throne’.

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.’

Little attention has ever been paid to a pair of mid-career flops by Thomas Augustine Arne. Henry and Emma died in one night in 1749; Don Saverio struggled through three nights amidst hisses in 1750. Roger Fiske points out in a brief discussion that the latter is of some historical significance: it was a pioneering attempt to mount an English form of opera buffa on the London stage. Ten years later, Arne's Thomas and Sally was to succeed in persuading London audiences to accept such conventions, but in 1750 the time was apparently not yet ripe. These obscure failures have not attracted much critical notice, because while librettos of both survive, only the overture to Henry and Emma and one song from Don Saverio are extant.

On 22 July 1917 Maurice Maeterlinck wrote to the composer Lili Boulanger: