An assumption widespread in twentieth-century analyses of Mozart's operas is that ‘high-level tonal planning’ – that is, a network of relationships among the tonic keys of separate numbers of an opera – contributes significantly to structure and meaning. A relatively recent example can be found in writings by Daniel Heartz and Tim Carter on Act I of Le nozze di Figaro, which concludes in C major with Figaro's aria ‘Non più andrai’.

The several contradictory, and even apologetic, explanations that were put forward concerning the origins of Mozart's Così fan tutte, ossia La scola degli amanti in the years following its première in 1790 reflect both the dearth of hard information concerning the commission to Mozart, and the unease with which the post-Josephinian era greeted this most unsettling of comic operas. One of the composer's first biographers, Franz Xaver Nêmetschek, wrote:

In the year 1789 in the month of December Mozart wrote the Italian comic opera Cosi fan tutte, or ‘The School for Lovers’; people are universally amazed that this great genius could condescend to waste his heavenly sweet melodies on such a miserable and clumsy text. It was not in his power to refuse the commission, and the text was given expressly to him.

Few things are more comforting to those with a tendency to procrastination than the knowledge that the fault is hardly unique. Few examples of procrastination are as magnificently extended, or should offer more solace to an author who has missed a deadline, as the history of Liszt's Sardanapale. Not only is the protracted gestation of this ultimately abandoned opera fascinating in its own right, and central to our view of Liszt's early Weimar years; it also illustrates a familiar maxim that in music, as in other human activities, the amount of talk is often in inverse proportion to the action.

Benjamin Britten's television opera, Owen Wingrave, first broadcast on the BBC on 16 May 1971, is probably the least known of his sixteen operatic works. Based on an equally obscure tale of the same name by Henry James, it concerns the last scion of a military family who decides to abandon his calling and embrace pacifism. After fierce family opposition and disinheritance, Owen agrees to spend the night in a haunted room in the family mansion of Paramore – a room in which an ancestor was found dead ‘without a wound’ after accidentally killing his son while disciplining him. Several hours later, his body is discovered – dead, without a wound, like that of his forbear. Despite the compeffing nature of the story, Owen Wingrave has never found a secure place in the Britten canon, largely owing to a lingering dissatisfaction aroused by the ending. In what follows, I should like to explore this dissatisfaction and propose a context within which to approach the opera.