Flanking the legend ‘Académie Nationale de Musique’ over the grand entrance to the Palais Garnier are the words ‘Chorégraphie’ on the left and ‘Poésie lyrique’ on the right, large enough to be legible from some distance. Ballet and opera were represented equally on the Académie's stage as well as on its façade: works of both kinds were created and performed in abundance there for much of the nineteenth century. Moreover, their interaction went beyond simply sharing the stage, and dated back to a time long before the Palais Garnier was built.

As far as we know, Wagner paid eight visits to Nuremberg, although I shall be concerned here only with the first four of them. The first was the longest – a week-long stay with his sister Clara and her husband Heinrich Wolfram in January 1834, when he was twenty. According to the much later account in Mein Leben, Wagner's only memory of this visit was ‘the sociable house’ of his brother-in-law and the gemütlich goings-on in Nuremberg's taverns. In July 1835, when talent-spotting for Heinrich Bethmann's near-insolvent opera company, he passed through Nuremberg towards the end of the month. It was on this occasion that he witnessed that ‘extraordinary nocturnal adventure’ which, according to Mein Leben, was to leave its mark on the final scene of Act II of Die Meistersinger. (What, to my own mind, is even more ‘extraordinary’ about this account is that it is confirmed neither by Die rothe Brieftasche – the aide-mémoire that Wagner began in August 1835 – nor by any of Wagner's letters of the time. It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that this is a case of life imitating art, a suspicion increased when we recall that the passage in Mein Leben was dictated between March and May 1866, just before Wagner embarked on the first complete draft of Act II of Die Meistersinger.)

Three thematic clusters can be inferred from the libretto of Billy Budd: the sexual, the spiritual and the social. Each exists dialectically with the other two, creating a characteristic apparent synthesis of their respective internal and relational contra-dictions. Indeed, Billy Budd's status as a masterpiece traditionally depends on an assumed successful and harmonious resolution of its thematic material within the overall musical context. However, this article will argue that no such resolution takes place and that this ‘failure’ is the opera's most striking and interesting characteristic. I do not wish to argue that exposing these contradictions, along with the failed strategies designed to effect customary artistic reconciliations, lessen the opera's status: they are better regarded as evidence of its most challenging and worthwhile aspects.

‘If music is a language, who is speaking?’ asked Edward T. Cone on the first page of The Composer's Voice (1974), later turning to such questions as ‘does a vocal persona [whether protagonist of a song or character in an opera] know he is singing?’ And does that persona hear the accompaniment? Cone's answer then was that ‘Consciously, he neither knows that he is singing nor hears the accompaniment; but his subconscious both knows and hears’.

‘Pur sempre su le nozze canzoneggiando vai.’ Arnalta's remark to Poppea (L'incoronazione di Poppea, Act II scene 10), occasioned by Poppea's lyrical exultation over the death of Seneca, provokes the closing sententia of Edward T. Cone's recent exploration of the ambiguous world of opera and its inhabitants. Translating the nurse's comment as ‘You're forever going around singing songs about your wedding’, Cone concludes that ‘this is just what characters in opera do: they go around singing songs all the time’.