This text attempts, for the first time, to concentrate largely known facts of the opera profession in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries into a concrete questioning of the restorative work concept in whose name the disciplining of German music theatre is currently being postulated. The opera composer of the 17th, 18th, and early 19th century was not the author of a “work”, but rather a creator of theatre responsible for the most contemporary possible musical “staging” of a canonical text or subject. In today’s music theatre (where world premieres are rare exceptions), this creative function has been transferred to the director. He is responsible for interrupting the automatisms of the reproduction, ritualised in the culture scene and commercialised by the classical music market, of a “classical” score in order to lend it renewed contemporaneity.