Emma Bovary may be the most famous spectator of the soirée à l'Opéra tradition, but when judged against some of its established conventions she is far from typical. The distinction can be summed up simply: she does not know how the music goes. Nevertheless her experience has a compelling musical teleology – structuring extended periods of depicted time, requiring a technical descriptive language that here and there makes the plot-narrative bulge uncharacteristically – that figures only momentarily in that of Monte-Cristo or his fellow audience-members. When the count hushes his companion because Duprez is about to sing a favourite line, he draws attention not so much to the progress of the music but rather to how little it has impinged on that of the dialogue up until that point; he also demonstrates that, for all his insistence on ignorance of Parisian society, in his knowledge of a particular operatic repertoire he is a bona fide part of it – and yet, in his interrupting a conversation to listen, irredeemably a foreigner.

Emma's rapt attentiveness is in this sense further expression (if any were needed, more than two-thirds of the way through the novel) of her not fitting in: the whole scene is out of keeping with its literary equivalents set in Paris, which are mainly predicated on regularity of attendance and sophisticated ignoring of the on-stage action (Flaubert's subtitle is, of course, Mœurs de province), but she is not like the other patrons of the Rouen opera house either, who are habitués and therefore depicted very much at their ease.

In E. M. Forster's novel Where angels fear to tread (1905), members of the Herriton family travel to Italy on a mission to rescue the offspring of a woman gone astray. That is, they search for the infant son of their sister-in-law Lilia, who has died in childbirth, with the intention of ensuring that he will be brought up in civilised, well-bred southern England and not by Gino, his Italian father, son of a provincial dentist. The most important illustration of the chasm of social and cultural difference that separates them from Gino, and that motivates them in their quest, is to be found three-quarters of the way through the book, when they attend a performance of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor at the opera house in Monteriano, a small Tuscan town Forster modelled on San Gimignano. Philip Herriton, who is enthusiastically Italophile, has cajoled his rather severe sister Harriet into joining him by using the magic words ‘Sir Walter Scott – classical, you know.’ In the event, she is appalled by the locals' shouting and throwing of bouquets during the performance: ‘“Call this classical?” she cried, rising from her seat. “It's not even respectable!”’

Like a number of other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels, including notable later examples by Forster himself, Where angels fear to tread associates receptivity to music with emotional and (at least as far as the class-conscious English are concerned) social liberation.

If in Le Fantôme de l'Opéra, a book full of representations of live operatic performance, the motivating conceit is nevertheless the aura of opera that is dead and gone, the works that followed it in the genre of the soirée à l'Opéra moved even further away from active dialogue between boxes and stage towards a mise en scène that was almost entirely imaginary. In line with the Modernist novel's general tendency towards interiority, but also as if following a progressively more domestic trajectory of its own, this novelistic set piece became tantalisingly amorphous, no longer tied to datable performances and real-life singers (as in Dumas), nor even to plausible, if fictional, outings (as in Flaubert), but rather a creatively indeterminate space for reflection on the widest possible questions of art and existence. As in Leroux (and before him, Verne), developments in consumer technology were frequently at the centre of this new disposition of musical production and reception. In the case of Marcel Proust, this exploration of new kinds of attendance at (or, better, to) opera manifested itself in his enthusiasm for the so-called ‘théâtrophone’, a telephone service that allowed the subscriber to listen to whatever happened to be on at the Opéra, Opéra-Comique or any of half a dozen other Parisian theatres.

Obviously an exciting advance in the dissemination of music so far as opera-lovers in belle-époque Paris were concerned, the théâtrophone is an irresistible critical tool for the present purposes too.

It is tempting to see in Proust's rendition of Tristan – clearly the example of opera in the novel most closely connected with actual performance, and no doubt also the most involved passage of counterpoint between operatic composition and literary character ever written – the ne plus ultra of the soirée à l'Opéra. Certainly the obsolescence of its original, theatrical manifestation seems persuasively demonstrated in À la recherche, not only by the enormously enriched reception made possible by its alternative, the explicit collapsing of the performer/audience distinction in the Tristan scene, but also by the petrifaction of the social structure portrayed in the one actual visit to the Palais Garnier described in the book. In the latter there is no music – the occasion is a gala performance of spoken theatre that includes an act of Racine's Phèdre featuring the great actress Berma – but for the Narrator the audience is as calcified as the operatic institution itself:

In December 2008 the Bibliothèque Nationale put on show some recently unearthed treasures from the French musical-archaeological patrimony: a pair of copper urns that had lain buried beneath the Paris Opéra for a century. Together they formed a musical time capsule containing a gramophone, instructions for its use, and two dozen shellac discs on which had been recorded performances by some of the most prominent artists of the late nineteenth century. The discs were donated in 1907 by Alfred Clark, the American head of the Compagnie Française du Gramophone. His only condition was that the containers should not be disinterred until a hundred years had passed, by which time the recordings inside would surely represent a priceless performance-practice legacy. In fact they were brought up from their silent resting place in 1989, when work on the Opéra's ventilation system revealed they were at risk, but the terms of the bequest were respected and only in December 2007 were they ceremoniously unsealed. A year later, the necessary restoration work having been completed, the library hosted a commemorative conference and reproduced the recordings on its website, where some of the exhumed voices may now be heard with eerie clarity despite their crackly patina of historical distance. Obviously pleased with its long-term publicity stunt, Clark's company announced that in its twenty-first century incarnation it would continue catering for the posterity market by creating another time capsule to house, in the words of the library's press release, ‘recordings representative of contemporary music’.