When Dr. Johnson referred to opera as an ‘exotic and irrational entertainment’ he had in mind the Saracen kings and Turkish princes who people opera seria and whose passions and betrayals were as remote to their audience as the planet Mars. For British opera-goers the entertainment remained resolutely exotic, whether presenting the gods and heroes of antiquity, the knights and maidens of medieval chivalry, or even the intrigues of Countess Almaviva's boudoir. Part of the shock of Peter Grimes in 1945 for British audiences lay in the realisation that this drama of cruelty and victimisation is set on their very doorstep, in Suffolk, a mere hundred miles from the seats in which they sat. It was the end of a form of innocence very common in opera, where remote peoples and places have always been more appealing material for song than the here-and-now.

In France, which in the nineteenth century boasted the most colourful opera in the world, settings and locations exhausted the chronicles of history and the map of the globe. We need no reminding of the Norman knights, Anabaptists, torreros and pearl-fishers in familiar French operas. Even when the setting was Paris, as in Le Pré aux clercs or Les Huguenots, the period was strictly historical. When Gounod filled the score of Mireille with echoes of Provence and Lalo evoked Breton legends and folksong in Le Roi d'Ys, France itself was seen to be exotic. It was difficult to escape.