Throughout, I have been trying to identify what goes missing from prominent disenchanting accounts of music, missing either as something not seen at all or as seen but rejected as a willful or reflexive deceit. That “something” is experience, our ordinary response to art. To propose experience as that missing quality in a modernist Mozart aesthetic introduces its own set of problems. Abbate and Parker's (and, in his own way, Hanslick’s) concern about hermeneutic solipsism has real credibility in the face of defensive appeals to experience, the ones where experience is used to halt self-reflection and conversation: “This is how I feel, and that's the end of the discussion.” Weaker versions of arguments from experience can also be problematic. Experiences can change over time or new conceptual frameworks compel a different, perhaps more comprehensive evaluation.

In one sense, the matter does not involve validating a particular experience so much as identifying the conditions by which music, including musical drama, can be experienced at all. If you value ambiguity, then there must be a text as utterance, not only as object, that is intended that way. If opera is unsettled, then mimesis must be in play for there even to be unsettledness. If some fictional characters can be sad or ambivalent, then some can be happy and sure. If we use concepts in acting on and evaluating art, then there is no a priori reason to exclude “return” from an art-critical lexicon.

Still, a defense of intention and mimesis also has the responsibility of showing how these concepts can produce compelling interpretations of individual works of art. To turn one last time to Figaro as an example: What can be seen when it is experienced as an intentional object and a musico-dramatic representation? Showing how the neostructuralist misframes not just general theoretical but specific analytical questions about opera can be an opportunity to see more clearly what is there—in this case, in one of the operatic repertory's most famous reconciliation scenes.

To start to bring to the fore what highly formalist accounts marginalize in listening as experience, there is a typically sage essay by Umberto Eco entitled “The Flaws in the Form.”