From this world emerge patterns of behavior and subjects of conflict that, though copiously detailed and colorfully decorated, show a surprisingly narrow range. The most significant variations occur at the beginning, in the mature comedies of Mozart. Despite efforts to represent these pieces as revolutionary, they are (like most comedies) dramas of social accommodation. They raise serious issues, allot conflict wide scope, and give full and seductive voicing to forces that menace social accommodation. But in the end they persuasively argue that individual ambitions and desires must not be allowed to derange a social system well defined by all the above adjectives save one, “nationalistic.”

Beyond Mozart, we encounter E-19’s paradigmatic plot and character distribution. In it, the protagonist is propelled by a sense of dispossession or other disconnection: he cannot assume his “rightful” place in the patriarchal scheme, and this injustice is the flash point of the plot. The outcast/hero falls instantly and obsessively in love with a woman identified through family or title with the very situation from which he is excluded. This forbidden woman returns his love. An antagonist opposes the fated couple by reason of his station (which is often aspired to by the protagonist) or his own attachment to the woman. Virtually every operatic drama of the Extended 19th is stamped from this matrix. In the purest examples, the hero is modeled directly on the original of his sort in Western culture, the literally dispossessed nobleman deprived of land and title in the royal consolidations of late feudal times. As wandering knight or troubadour, he woos his well-connected but taboo lady according to the codes of courtly love that strongly influenced romantic relationships through to the end of E-19 itself.

There is no stopping this tale even when characters must exchange positions, assume disguise, or choose the role of the dispossessed. For over a century, we sang ourselves this story, and fashioned from it an incomparable body of work. Then we stopped. In the handful of comedies among these works (for example, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Don Pasquale) social accommodation seems possible—justice is found within the system. But in the far more numerous tragedies, the question of whether the ubiquitous drama of romantic love and social position can come to any good end against the laws and institutions of the patriarchy is answered with an emphatic no. Although this is a world where men guard the instruments of political and economic action, women are far from powerless. They have, in fact, a power above any obtainable in the earthly realm of male mayhem—that of salvation and damnation. Women save with their gifts of martyrdom and intercession. Driven to insanity by male rigidity, cruelty, and misunderstanding, they soon cast themselves into waves, ride into flames, drink poison, and thereby release us from the consequences of our folly. Or they intercede, first with worldly authority (appeals to kings, landgraves, doges) and failing that, with God Himself, the top of the patriarchal line.

Against this throng of beloved and worshiped madwomen, self sacrificers, and Marian appellants, E-19 poses the women of damnation, a line that stretches from beginning (Queen of the Night) to end (Turandot). These dangerous ladies refuse their roles in the romantic drama. Through resort to the occult or an engulfing sexuality, or because through some systemic blip they hold a piece of a customarily male power, they cause no end of disruption. They must be converted (Kundry or Thaïs), conquered and put in place (E-19’s final word, in Turandot), or terminated, either by death (Carmen) or by the intervention of superior male occult forces (Ortrud or Dalila). In a few instances, both sides of this female duality are united in a single character, creating the most interesting and lifelike female roles in the canon, a Violetta or Manon.