The train of thought that I wish to pursue here was initiated by Edward T. Cone's recent essay ‘The World of Opera and its Inhabitants’. To the extent that my views diverge from his I suppose I may be taken for a critical adversary. But I prefer to think of the present effort as more a continuation and development of Professor Cone's ideas than an attempt to refute or criticise them. It is in the spirit of ongoing research rather than the more common one, in my profession, of philosophical confrontation that I offer remarks on the general questions, as posed by Cone: ‘How does the world of opera differ from other dramatic worlds? Who are the people that inhabit it, and what sorts of lives do they lead there?’ More particularly, my question is: What is the nature of operatic utterance? How are operatic characters ‘saying’?

In the first section of my paper I will present Professor Cone's answers to these questions. In the second I will go on what will appear, no doubt, to be a completely tangential excursion into R. G. Collingwood's philosophy of art. But in the final two sections I will try to weave these two seemingly disparate strands together into an answer of my own to the questions that Professor Cone has so insightfully raised. Perhaps ‘an answer of my own’ is too strong a phrase to use, implying something more like disagreement than is actually the case. So a better way of describing my whole enterprise, and the final sections especially, is ‘variations on a theme by Cone’.