For my part, I cannot cease admiring the intelligence with which Monsieur Piccinni has led the audience from sentiment to sentiment, from interest to interest; how he has graduated the effect of his music – how one feels not only each scene but also its connection with the general tone of the subject; how all the airs, all the recitatives, all the ballets, all the choruses tend to refer to the whole, how all these individual groups eventually form a total group in which everything agrees, everything is true, in which each detail sets off those surrounding it. That is worthy to be called genuine dramatic music.

In Act III of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, the chaplain Raimondo appears at the wedding celebrations to tell the assembled guests that Lucia has murdered her husband Arturo. While the chorus expresses shock, Lucia enters, dishevelled and deranged; the crowd turns towards her, murmuring ‘Par dalla tomba uscita!’ This image of a figure emerging from the grave, certainly apt by nineteenth-century poetic standards, also suggests itself as a contemporary metaphor: a shift in critical reception. Traditionally, a noisy chorus of operatic critics has regarded Lucia with a mixture of fascination and horror, emphasising the sepulchral aspects of her madness. Recently, however, a rather surprising resurrection has been effected through the notion, popular among some feminist critics, that Lucia's mental decline could be interpreted as positive, even liberatory. This view has been expressed most flamboyantly by Catherine Clément, for whom madness is one of the few ways an operatic heroine can escape the near-inevitable plot process of seduction and death. Her effusions on Lucia's mad scene illustrate this position vividly: ‘Lucia dances with her desires: listen how joyful, airy and peaceful it is. Who says anything about unhappiness? Madwomen's voices sing the most perfect happiness’

On 16 September 1989 a national British newspaper, The Independent, carried a full page advertisement placed by Technics for their latest ‘Hi-Fi Midi System for Music Lovers’, the CDX3. At the top of the page, Wagner's furrowed brow and glaring eyes, slightly askance, stared out as if insisting on, though not quite peremptorily demanding, a close reading of the text beneath. The text began as follows (comments in square brackets are mine):

To hear what he [Wagner] intended a hi-fi system has to be perfectly composed.

Harrison Birtwistle's musico-dramatic works all show a preoccupation with intricate formal design. Thus they fall firmly in the Modernist tradition, inherited on the one hand from the Second Viennese School (consider Webern's Piano Variations Op. 27 with its mirrors upon mirrors) and on the other from Stravinsky's later ballets (Birtwistle has acknowledged Agon as a major debt). But in works such as Punch and Judy, Yan Tan Tethera and The Mask of Orpheus, the self-conscious elevation of formal structure (sometimes to its extreme, ritual) distances us, even more than in neo-Classical Stravinsky, from any tendency to realism in the drama. In The Mask of Orpheus, Birtwistle's priorities are clear: he has said repeatedly that this opera is not about Orpheus; it is about writing a particular kind of work with a particular set of problems to solve. He could have just as easily chosen Faust for his libretto (and almost did). With Gawain, however, he seems to be moving in a new direction. Wagner's spirit (particularly as expressed in Parsifal) has entered the work; a new emphasis on drama in its naturalistic sense, and a new relationship between linear, narrative flow and closed forms has transported Gawain to new territory.

David Rosen has written a detailed critique of my essay, ‘Opera Talk: A Philosophical “Phantasie”’, which appeared in a recent issue of this journal. I am grateful to him for his interest in what I had to say there. But at the same time I fear that he has misconstrued it. The result is that he has set up a parade of straw men which (not surprisingly) he has knocked – indeed bludgeoned – to the turf. There are a lot of straw men standing in for a lot of real ones, some of the real ones more important than others. It would be a bore for me as well as for my readers were I to run through them all (and if I tried, the vigilant editors of the journal would, quite rightly, put a stop to my profligacy). So I am going to concentrate on a very few of what I take to be the most important ones, and ones that cluster around the same basic issue. In the process, I hope not only to perform the negative task of refuting Rosen's ‘refutation’, but the positive one of pushing my project forward, at least to the extent of clarifying it.