This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

In moments of lethargy, thoughts turn to those hot muse babes gallivanting on the slopes of Mount Helicon, splashing about in the river Permessos, jiving round Jove’s altar — killing time till the SOS comes in from some poor blocked poet or painter, and off flies Calliope or Erato like an International Rescue squad member with an emergency package of aesthetic caustic soda and useful tips.

Nice for those poets, etc, with a named muse to whistle up when the going gets tough. My question is, what about practitioners of sarcastic journalism? Who the hell are we supposed to call? Euterpe and Thalia aren’t picking up messages, that’s for sure.

There is another theory about inspiration, to wit, that it emerges from somewhere much nearer than Attic hillsides. Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart’s librettist, deadline-harried as he nocturnally scribbled the words to Don Giovanni alongside two other operas, kept a supply of Tokay to hand, a load of snuff — and his landlady’s 16-year-old daughter on permanent call for various kinds of relief, some perhaps not foreseen by her mother. Byron, similarly, reported to John Murray about additions to his regular “inspiration diet” of gin-and-water in Venice as the words of Don Juan tumbled out of him:

There’s a whore on my right,
For I rhyme best at night
When a C — is tied close to my
Inkstand …

As with writers, so with music: composers have been no slouches when it comes to the sauce — incidentally, it is a happy truth that both Brahms and Liszt were true buggers for the bottle.

Naturally enough, dipsoes and piss-heads are also fantastically well represented on the opera stage, from occasional polite tipplers (even Vincenzo Bellini’s Puritani can put it away) to that huge bombard of sack, old Falstaff himself.

Much of 19th century opera takes place in a wooze of smoke and alcohol: Violetta in La traviata can be only very hazily aware of what’s going on around her, enjoying as she does a party lifestyle on the Keith Moon scale.

Over-hearty breakfasts (shading seamlessly into lunch) lie behind psychotic Russian pieces like Mussorgsky’s Khovanschina, where the Interior Ministry troops, already heavily stuck into the morning BMs, have trouble piecing together the details of the exuberant atrocities they visited on the people of Moscow the previous night.

It’s a tough life in opera and we should thank them for putting their livers on the line for us

The best way to read Johann Strauss’ operetta Die Fledermaus is as a documentary charting the stages of drunkenness with spectral accuracy, from the innocent jollity of Act 1 cocktails to the maudlin ravings of the you’re-my-best-mate singalong “Brüderlein und Schwesterlein”, to the unmediated horror of the next morning’s hungover jail scene, where the jittery inmates are subjected to the mumbled ramblings of the third-stage alcoholic jailer Frosch, an even more tiresome version of Macbeth’s pal the Porter.

Really, who can blame them? — it’s a tough life in opera and we should thank them for putting their livers on the line for us. Pleasingly, the starting gun for all this relaxed behaviour is also recorded in opera: the surviving personnel of Handel’s Semele are rewarded at the end when Apollo plucks the baby Bacchus, a sort of Wine Society Jesus, out of the smoking pile of ashes that was his mama, the unfortunate heroine.

This jovial, experimentalist rewrite of Christianity as a more convivial affair than the one on offer in church continues with Don Giovanni, who (well refreshed with Marzemino) consecrates an attractively heterodox new Eucharist of flesh and life-blood — “Vivan le femmine! Viva il buon vino!” — at his own Last Supper (and this, children, is why he gets consigned to the Hot Place, nothing to do with his other pastimes).

Despite the many pretenders, there’s really only one king of this particular liquid hill: the hero of Jacques Offenbach’s opéra fantastique of 1881, The Tales of Hoffmann (at Covent Garden from 7 November).

Of all the true bangers in the repertoire, Hoffmann is the most elusive: a homage to the whole of Romantic opera, a sly take on recent Parisian history and Offenbach’s place in it, a perceptive gaze at the auto-destructive artifices of art and of lovers. Offenbach’s librettists pitch the 18th century German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann into four of his own phantasmagoric stories, a well-oiled ordeal that leaves him a wreck on the floor of the Nuremberg boozer where he spins these yarns whilst trying to get it on with the prima donna singing in the opera house next door.

The opera asks, and rather marvellously incarnates musically, what inspiration means. Hoffmann believes it’s the booze and the birds that fuel his fire: each story contains a mix of intoxication and a catastrophic love story. But all along he is the tool of another party altogether, a merciless puppet-mistress putting him through the wringer for the sake of art.

Hoffmann’s heart must be burnt to ashes before he can be a true poet. This Muse — for it is she — emerges from a wine barrel, where I suppose she has been resting from her long trip. No happy lover ever wrote anything worthwhile, she says: you must destroy yourself in my service. Might be worth thinking about before you put in that call to Helicon.

The Tales of Hoffman, the Royal Opera House, 7 November to 1 December