Öffers kam Mozart zum Schack, um ihn zu einem Spaziergang abzuholen, und während Schack derselbe ankleidete, setzte sich Kapellmeister Mozart an dessen Schreibtisch und komponirte hier und da ein Stück in desselben Opern; daher in des Schack Opern mehrere Stellen von Mozarts eigener Hand und Genie vorkommen.

Among surviving portraits of Augusta Holmès is a photograph taken towards the end of her life (Fig. 1). The setting is her home: possibly the main room, but more likely a study, since the picture is dominated by a grand piano at which the composer stands imperiously. Images such as this – emphasising professional zeal rather than feminine charm – were the exception in the representation of women composers at the end of the nineteenth century. A vase of flowers, a flowing gown and a recumbent posture would have been typical. In high-necked blouse and dark skirt, hair pulled back severely to reveal a large, pale face, Holmès is less alluring; but she is ready to compose. The image also engages with contemporary conventions of representing male composers. Within the photograph is another, a framed portrait on the piano, positioned so that it reproduces Holmès' features. Richard Wagner: same bushy cravat, same forbidding pose. Almost the same, but not quite.

Roland Barthes discusses a postmodern condition in his last book, Camera Lucida: everything is signified and visible, and everything has the flatness of the photographic image; even death is rendered platitudinous, flat. If everything can be represented, nothing can be represented that would distinguish it from the mass of images already available; and if everything is for consumption in conditions of distraction, then difference disappears; we are left in a state Barthes calls ‘indifference’. Barthes then looks for the punctum: any point of unrepresentability that will punctuate or pierce the smoothness of the studium (art marked out by completeness, by total visibility). The punctum, by its wounding quality, would be a signifier pointing to something outside representation, outside the studium, and inasmuch as opera in the condition of postmodernism is likely to be a saturated medium, absorbed by viewers and listeners in conditions of distraction, the question arises, what punctum could it bear? There is, of course, nothing that could be isolated as such: it is, rather, that which by being outside representation appeals to what might be called–adapting Walter Benjamin's sense of photography as pointing to an ‘optical unconscious’ – an ‘aural unconscious’ just outside the text.

Stories, whether true or calculatedly false, have played at best an ancillary role in the evolution of Berio's approach to musical theatre. Indeed, to find a straightforward example of story-telling in his output, one would have to go back some twenty years from La vera storia to his previous collaboration with Italo Calvino, Allez Hop (1959), an ironic parable narrated in mime. But as soon as subsequent commissions offered Berio the resources of the human voice, he turned away from the seductions of a central narrative core, and instead built his vision of the potential of musical theatre around a more allusive and multi-layered conception. Narratives are still skeletally present – for instance, in Passaggio (1962), which employs the barest outlines of a scenario, spelt out explicidy only at the end, as a frame on which to hang a complex web of poetic and theatrical imagery, or indeed Opera (1970), with its intertwining myths of the ancient and modern worlds evoked through concentrated imagery, but not acted out. But the narrative twists and turns that are the chief pleasure of the story-teller – and the chief impetus behind the lyric outbursts of the operatic tradition – were no longer his concern.

Siena 1880. During his penultimate trip to Italy, Richard Wagner stayed for nearly two months in the neighbourhood of Siena. He was completing the orchestration of Parsifal, and went one day to visit the cathedral. Hardly had he got inside when he dissolved into tears, exclaiming ‘this the Temple of the Grail’. And indeed, if you look at the stage designs for the third act of Parsifal as they were prepared for the first performance at Bayreuth in 1882, you will find that the Temple of the Grail does in fact open on to a fairly faithful reconstruction of the interior of this city's exceptionally beautiful cathedral.