Male rock stars can be manly and wear dresses too — ask Harry Styles

blast of clairvoyance expressed through a freaky mix of panto and esoteric fooflah. Nobody really knows what turns the

Flute from a fairytale adorned by a bunch of cute slogans into a serious manifesto to renew the face of the earth: Mozart’s pared-back late style, the radiance of his harmony and a transfixing wizardry in sound, an economy, clarity and warmth that is largely down to the lucky accident of his existing at just the right moment between the mathematical perfection of the baroque and the wild subjectivity of Beethoven.

Mostly it’s the adamant conviction behind this brew of folksy romps, earnest Bachian counterpoint, bells that make evil prance away, hymns, crazed rage-arias and the sweetest of love songs: Mozart’s absolute sureness that true wisdom is born of human love, that with a bit of faith and a sturdy avoidance of falsehood — and perhaps a magic flute — the earthly paradise is a serious possibility. As with Thomas Hardy’s Christmas cows, you catch yourself believing, or at least hoping, it might be so.

That’s all fine and dandy, but hardly the thing for this of all seasons of heavily modified goodwill. For that we must turn to our true Christmas poster boy, Goethe’s pettish poet Werther, the guy who turned the whole of Europe into self-pitying emos aeons before Kurt Cobain’s first minor-key whinge.

Yet in Jules Massenet’s fey romantic opera, this pill has one big, unarguable redemptive moment: deranged for the love of his mate’s wife, and by the sheer horror of an old-time Wetzlar Christmas with its carolling German moppets, foul glühwein and enforced roistering, he chooses the day itself to top himself in a particularly messy, drawn-out and attention-seeking way. And I think we can all applaud levels of integrity like those.