Not least because of its librettist, Tarare (1787) ranks among the most interesting ‘reform’ operas of the eighteenth century. The work was by no means unique among such efforts at the Académie Royale de Musique, but it undoubtedly had the greatest impact after the Piccinni controversy at the end of the 1770s, in part because Beaumarchais was untiring in his efforts to promote the new opera – a task at which he was far superior to his librettistic colleagues. He presented his new operatic conception in a detailed preface to the libretto (‘Aux Abonnés de l'Opéra’), the central point of which was to emphasise the mixture of conventional genre traditions, in particular of serious and comic elements.

On 13 March 1797, Cherubini's Médée was given its première at the Théâtre Feydeau in Paris. The opera was designed to be a tragédie lyrique with all the trappings: only the hostility directed towards young composers (Cherubini, but also Méhul and Le Sueur) during the Terror and the Directory had prevented its performance at the city's first theatre, the Académie Royale de Musique (briefly re-christened the Théâtre de la République et des Arts after the Revolution). Although Cherubini's opera followed the conventions of opéra comique (most important, of course, the use of spoken dialogue), it also bore significant traces of late eighteenth-century opera seria dramaturgy. This generic eclecticism placed Médée in the midst of an aesthetic tangle, an early manifestation of nineteenth-century opera's strained but still powerful connection to eighteenth-century conventions.

Two dissimilar subjects – Hermann Levi (1839–1900), a Jewish Wagnerian who conducted the Bayreuth première of Parsifal, and Parsifal itself – can be seen in a critical discourse that binds them together in a paradoxical relationship. In accounts of both Levi and the opera he conducted, certain historians and critics have made a point of stripping away a supposed veneer of aesthetic deception in order to expose the raw underbelly of historical truth. In these revisionist readings, Levi's enthusiasm for Wagner and his music amounts to a shameful form of Jewish ‘self-hatred’, while Parsifal, far from espousing a message of compassion and redemption, propagates ideas of an solidarity and racial supremacy. To advance these arguments is tantamount to claiming that moral and psychological categories such as shame and guilt are appropriate ways to describe a musician's life or the historical legacy of an opera; and these are views I find difficult to share. The slogan in my title should thus be understood as an ironic commentary, as well as a call to formulate the questions in a new way. Although I can only sketch the outlines of an alternative approach, I will suggest that critical accounts shaming Hermann Levi for his Wagnerism, and damning Parsifal for its anti-Semitism, are cut from the same cloth; they need to be revalued by a musicology that traffics in both an aesthetic understanding of art works and a critical assessment of the cultural framework in which this understanding is produced.

As late as April 1928, it appeared unlikely that Berg would choose Frank Wedekind's Lulu plays as the basis of the new opera he was contemplating. By then he had narrowed his search for a libretto to Wedekind's plays and Gerhart Hauptmann's Und Pippa tanzt, and – contrary to the advice of friends such as Theodor Adorno – he was leaning towards Hauptmann. On 26 April he wrote to Arnold Schoenberg:

I'm thinking of my new work with the apprehension I feel before every new project. It will probably be Pippa, though Hauptmann's oppressive conditions (including 50% share of the royalties) don't make the work seem very advisable – from the ‘practical’ standpoint.

At the climax of his account of a night of drunken adventure, Albert Herring, who has at last thrown off conventional restraints, suddenly breaks off: ‘a nightmare example of drunkenness, dirt, and worse…’. At which point the Glyndebourne production of a few years ago had Albert produce from his shirt an outsize pair of women's bloomers. The visual aid was presumably deemed necessary because the text does not make clear what inference we are to draw. The nature of Albert's desire is left open, and at least one early reviewer recognised that there might be a less conventional understanding of the superficially hilarious romp that Albert Herring presents. More recently, Philip Brett has trenchantly argued that the opera is a parable of the ‘coming out’ of a young gay man set against the oppression of small-town respectability, a view I believe to be in essence correct. There may, however, be room for a more detailed study of those elements in the text that enable us to affirm it with confidence.