The prevalence of unhappy endings suggests an awareness that this way of handling things works out rather poorly. What are the alternatives, however? True, one might substitute matriarchal for patriarchal guidance. In two of Wagner’s greatest works (Tristan and The Ring), it is implied that female power as an active force may bring transcendence. But Tristan concludes with the deaths of all principal parties and the reign of eternal night, and The Ring with the end of the world. Hard to see any gain there. Yet in this quality of transcendence lies E-19’s answer to the difficulty. Early in the era, it has a religious cast: happiness will come in another world. Later, as faith in this idea erodes, it becomes harder to determine of what this transcendence may consist, but it is still there, written into the music. A mere handful of the veristic pieces are brutish enough to hint that with death, la commedia è finita; there won’t be transcendence, after all. And only in the three greatest comedies of the epoch (Meistersinger, Falstaff, Rosenkavalier) is the old social accommodation viewed with sufficient complexity and perspective to afford  hope for transcendence on earth. They are the wisest operas of E-19.

No wonder we are in trouble with E-19, and it with us. It is a world best described by indigestible adjectives, in which male outcasts play out a drama of romantic fixation against establishment rivals, and in which such good women as retain mental competence attempt to save them by sacrificing themselves or interceding with one Father or another, while bad women use magic and sex to damn them. This is a world whose possible continuing reality we do not care to admit. And so we are running from it, as fast as our well-toned little legs will carry our androgynous little bodies and our enormous, furiously rationalizing heads. We might make a clean getaway if it were only a matter of the dramatic scheme. Inconveniently, there is the music, particularly its ecstatic, transcendent element, song. Swept into it still, we come away fearing that E-19 is telling us we are a creatively enfeebled people, hopelessly entangled in debates about language and other complications we confuse with depth of meaning, unable to release anything direct except, in our commercial culture, a kind of enraged antisong.

Worse, we are forced to concede that if music of such beauty, force, and emotional truth sprang from the ideas and attitudes we have been considering, we may not rid ourselves of these through simple banishment. They may live on, in a kind of inner exile. If, however, we can contain E-19—vitiate its force, bend its politics and aesthetics—but at the same time extend its nominal influence, we may be able to keep open our opera houses and record stores without feeling too badly about ourselves. This would involve finding ways to blur the dramatic content of the operas while placing restraints on the music, especially by weakening its song element. Preferably, these ends should be gained by means that appear constructive and dedicated. A number of devices, usually summed up as “crazy productions” and “boring music,” aid us in these efforts.