To aver that there can be no ambiguity without intention is clearly not a position compatible with the poetics of Adorno or Levin or Abbate and Parker. Only with the overthrow of the author-concept can the virtue of ambiguity settle into and enrich the analysis of music. It is true that, with Adorno no less than Abbate and Parker, the erasure of the author is not complete. What Adorno presents as concession, that it is “impossible … to conceive of music … as bereft of the element of subjectivity,” Abbate and Parker enact as concluding hope, which is that Mozart's “enigmatic smile” may “broaden a fraction” upon the acceptance of their dismembering method, which challenges our confidence in the coherence of opera, in the possibility that music, text, and staging could harmonize.

Along with retaining a residual intention, Abbate and Parker's dismembering poetics grounds it claims on one other conventional authority, and that is history. Perhaps affirming in deed what they deny in word poses only a trivial difficulty for their argument, but also noteworthy is the way Abbate and Parker see the operation of history. There was a time when a truer image of Mozart prevailed and then a later one that pulled a screen over him. That concealment took place in the nineteenth century, with the advent of a Wagnerian musical hermeneutics: it is “the aesthetic of … the Gesamtkunstwerk [that] has been privileged by one hundred years of late-nineteenth-century and twentieth- century opera criticism, and has become our dominant code for reading opera.” That “code” has been retroactively applied to Mozart, with the result that his “mature operas … somehow remain perennially sacrosanct, impervious to the shadows of ambiguity” (188).

As Umberto Eco has observed, it is a tendency for any work that a culture has made “sacred” to attract “suspicious” readings. This revisionism happens not just to overtly sacred texts but “metaphorically sacred” ones, as well— Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Joyce, in addition to Scripture. Certainly with Figaro criticism, it is too tidy to trace its present-day status to the triumph of a Wagnerian aesthetics.