Titian: The Rape of Europa, 1559–62; in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

A philosopher interested in public life can learn from how the popular media handle issues of art and morality. I read with interest now and then Slipped Disc, a web site devoted to gossip about the music world. Recently they posted a discussion about a Mozart performance under the heading, “This is what you’ll receive if you want to see Marriage of Figaro at Glyndebourne Festival Opera”. The advisory statement warned potential spectators that the opera presented unwanted sexual advances and aggressive behavior. (Read it for yourself, it’s on-line.) True enough, but you don’t need to have studied musicology to know that. A glance at Wikipedia will suffice. What interested me, however, was that the responses on-line ridiculed this statement. Marriage of Figaro is a great opera set in the old regime, several people said, and so why would anyone need to be warned about the morality of the story? You might as well complain, I suppose, that Rossini’s operas about Islam reveals him to be an Orientalist.

Here, I believe, we actually face a very interesting issue, which deserves reflection. To what extent are we justified in looking critically at the moral issues presented by an artistic masterpiece from an earlier era? I am asking: should we judge that work by our standards, or — rather— might we not admit that it is of an earlier time, when different ways of thinking were prevalent? It happens that in........

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