My essay expands on the concept of Musiktheater and points out the possibility of interpreting the term as a type of theatre, a genre, and a synonym for the contemporary strategies of staging operas. I also survey the latter two of the three ranges of meaning and discuss in detail those endeavours in music theatre that separated from the genre of opera in the second half of the last century, as well as the rise of Regietheater in the field of “lyric theatre”, which can be interpreted as a reaction to the trend of performing a narrow canon of Western operas.