In 1998 the American soprano Renée Fleming fell foul of what one journalist has called ‘the style police’ at La Scala in Milan. Performing the title role in Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia, Fleming encountered opposition from the conductor Gianluigi Gelmetti when she introduced some decorative appoggiaturas into her vocal lines. As Philip Gossett puts it in his account of the event, Gelmetti has ‘an exaggerated respect for notation’. Since composers like Donizetti normally left appoggiaturas to the intelligence of performers they did not write them into their scores, and Gelmetti had taken this as authority for refusing Fleming’s additions. The tensions that occurred in preparation for the performances led to a classic La Scala brouhaha on the opening night in which, in Gossett’s words, ‘general havoc reigned and Gelmetti collapsed’.

The incident was caused by two contradictory understandings of the nature of the operatic score: an approach that understands the score as a prompt for performance, and a more fundamentalist understanding of the score as a quasi-biblical authority whose every letter must be observed in performance. In his study of nineteenth-century music the German musicologist Carl Dahlhaus argued that musical activity in that century could be divided into these two camps, characterized by Italian opera (but also including virtuoso instrumentalists such as Liszt and Paganini) and German instrumental music: