The woodwinds cover everything else — the oboe for the duck, the clarinet for the cat, as we remember. And always die Zauberflöte for the sound of magic. The flute for the mechanical nightingale; the flute for a change in the winds; the flute for the riddle, the rhyme, and the moral.

What moral? What is all this for? The moral, about which we may argue long after we go home — we may argue for centuries — is sometimes a couplet, stapled upon the end like a gospel amen, and sometimes a secret, coiled and arbitrary and encoded within the syllables of the script, the syllables of what is said and left unsaid. Useful to remember what Erik Christian Haugaard, translator from the Danish of the tales of Hans Christian Andersen, suggested: “The fairy tale belongs to the poor. I know of no fairy tale which upholds the tyrant, or takes the part of the strong against the weak. A fascist fairy tale is an absurdity.”

We’ll have to take that on faith until we experience what follows, so hush, settle your coats under your seats. They are tuning up the magic. It’s almost time.

But what time is this? What is the time of the tale? Our program is cunning and obscure on the matter. Jane Langton, writer of evanescent and everyday fantasies for children, holds that the tale takes place sometime between the fall of Constantinople and the invention of the internal combustion engine. Accurate enough, or perhaps I mean vague enough; but the tale itself is a trickster and doesn’t hesitate to lie. It is anachronistic with a vengeance. It emerges always and everywhere, overt or disguised, pureblood or hybrid, and healthy as sin.

Indeed — I’m gabbling now, in a whisper, for the houselights are dimming — the time of the tale, nearly upon us, is perhaps its greatest mystery. For, if anything else about it is dubious or nonessential, faërie’s agency stems from its capacity to be mysteriously non sequitur.