“The art of music,” wrote Ralph Vaughan Williams, “above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation.” Giuseppe Verdi knew this better than most. His opera about the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar’s conquering of Jerusalem, Nabucco, propelled the destitute composer to the epicenter of Italy’s artistic ecosystem: and also its politics.

Before unification in 1861, the Italian peninsula was a patchwork of separate states, with Habsburg Austria controlling much of the north. Risorgimento, the socio-political movement calling for Italian unification, called for the end of Austrian rule. Nabucco was the ideal candidate to become a symbol of the nationalist cause: in the plight of the Hebrew slaves, lamenting for their lost homeland, Italian audiences saw their own political struggle mirrored.

Smetana and Sibelius offered something similar for the Czechs and Finns in Dalibor and Finlandia. But the most ardent proponent of operatic nationalism is also its most infamous. Wagner intended his Der Ring des Nibelungen to be a foundational myth for a nation still in search of its soul. Like Verdi’s Italy, Wagner’s Germany was not a unified state, but rather a jumble of rival kingdoms, principalities, and free cities, loosely connected by a shared heritage.

Wagner was a passionate advocate for unification, writing often of his devotion to the “fatherland”. His involvement in the failed revolutionary uprisings of 1848 led to exile in Switzerland, where he conceived of and wrote most of The Ring Cycle, drawing on the Nibelungenlied and other medieval epics to craft a mythical vision of his homeland.

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But why didn’t Britain produce its own Ring Cycle? The talent was there, but the need was not so great. Victorian Britain, at the height of its empire, had little use for art as a vehicle of national self-definition. Industrial prosperity and moral confidence sat comfortably alongside colonial exploitation. A nation that ruled a quarter of the world had no cause to go searching for its soul. Unlike the fragmented nations of continental Europe, still reeling from the shadow of Napoleonic conquest and Habsburg dominance, Britain knew, with considerable satisfaction, exactly what it was.

Indeed, Britain’s self-consciousness was already so distinct that it can use its identity as the basis of satire. Through Gilbert and Sullivan’s light operas we sense a culture so at ease with itself that it can afford to mock its own grandeur. HMS Pinafore lampoons Royal Navy hierarchies; Iolanthe pokes fun at Parliament; Ruddigore mocks the aristocracy.

It was not until Britain was reeling from the Second World War that a strong contender for a national opera emerged. Britten, fleeing war-torn Europe for America, stumbled across E.M. Forster’s essay on poet George Crabbe, whose poem “The Borough” was a proto-Dickensian narrative poem set on the Suffolk coast. It stirred in the expatriate composer, himself a Suffolk native, an overwhelming longing for home. Britten returned to Britain in 1942 and, collaborating with the librettist Montagu Slater, loosely adapted Crabbe’s work into what would become Peter Grimes.

After the mysterious but ultimately accidental deaths of his young apprentices, Grimes is ostracized by his village. Soon, the grim underbelly of the community is sliced open: blood, guts, and paranoia spill out. Grimes splinters into hysteria as the villagers become a murderous mob baying for blood.

Critics immediately recognized the opera’s power when it premiered at Sadler’s Wells, newly reopened after six years of wartime closure. New productions sprung up across Europe, ushering in a new age for British classical music.

As a gay man and a conscientious objector, Britten undoubtedly mapped his own sense of isolation onto Grimes’s exile. But the opera’s potency has grown beyond Grimes’s personal psychodrama. Despite being nominal victors in 1945, Britain had been left exhausted and bankrupt. On the international stage, its status as a global superpower was vanishing, and nationalist movements were gathering pace across its colonies.

With the empire’s days numbered, British identity faced an inflection point, and Peter Grimes has come to mirror this dynamic. The economic dereliction of the Suffolk fishing village bleeds into the psyche of its inhabitants. Boiling indignation fills in the hole in their hearts. Their hopelessness latches onto anyone who is perceived to threaten its fragile order, translating into violence.

Deborah Warner’s 2022 production, now back at the Royal Opera House, amplified questions about Britain’s post-Brexit identity crisis, updating the setting from Crabbe’s early 19th century to something more contemporary. A pugnacious chorus clad in football shirts wield Union Jacks as they call for Grimes’s expulsion, magnifying the moral panic and intoxicating power of the herd. When it premiered, the juxtaposition echoed the still-raw memory of the Euro 2020 final, where nationalism curdled from pride into persecution, and where some fans aimed racist abuse at black players.

Four years on from the original production, Warner’s blend of community decline, paranoia and nationalism has only become more searing. Like in 1945, after all, Britain must again search for its identity in a brave new world ravaged by disorder. We witness this identity crisis play out in public. A hard-Right resurgence proffers an ethnically exclusive vision of Britain. The Union Jack is brandished, like in Warner’s production, as a weapon of division rather than a unifying symbol of pride.

Political upheaval, if nothing else, gives us great art to wrestle with. Perhaps the national uncertainty we face today will inspire a new generation of artists to create new works that can mold a new identity for a new Britain. And as we continue to search for solid ground, post-empire, post-Brexit, post-certainty, we might do well to return to the Suffolk coast where the questions Britten embedded in Peter Grimes have not been answered — but have at least become clearer.

Yet the choirs’, and congregations’, favourite describes himself only as “friend, fellow traveller, and agnostic supporter of the Christian faith”. He has problems with God as a controlling deity: “a bit like a Mafia don who is capable of doing good and charitable things, but also almost takes pleasure in doing malicious and harmful things”. Covid-19 might surely count as one of those mafioso stunts. Undaunted, the tireless and selfless Rutter has just written a new seasonal piece, Joseph’s Carol, in honour of the scientists who worked on the Oxford vaccine. It premiered in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre last Friday.

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Christmas is the time for atheists, agnostics, heretics, waverers and those whose frail faith patchily comes and goes like the reception of Magic FM in the Chilterns (as Boris Johnson once put it) to drown their doubts and enjoy the glorious musical monuments to centuries of firm belief. Except that, often, they are no such thing. Rutter, the sympathetic “fellow traveller” with Christianity, stands on the shoulders of musical giants who shared his semi-detachment, yet laid down much of the Western soundtrack of religious observance.

“There is no reason why an atheist could not write a good Mass,” said Ralph Vaughan Williams — a “cheerful agnostic” who spent half a century revitalising the music of the Church of England, after he edited the English Hymnal in 1906 and wrote, or adapted from folk-songs, some of its best tunes. (The melody for “O Little Town of Bethlehem” was collected from a Surrey farmhand.) Some atheists did write masses, though a groping, stumbling doubt marks many sceptical masterworks more than confident unbelief. Still, even a church-averse anti-clericalism has never held composers of sacred music back. Camille Saint-Saëns had “a repugnance for religious ceremonial”. But he wrote more than 50 ecclesiastical works — a rather lovely Christmas Oratorio among them.

In his splendidly sourced and argued book Dominion, Tom Holland has shown how Christian precepts and feelings shape today’s secularism. Ghosts of church doctrine and practice guide the superficially godless creeds of contemporary politics and culture. However, the musical canon of the past two centuries indicates that this traffic flows two ways. The modern Christian culture that many people like to revisit as tourists at Christmas itself owes much to non- or half-believers.

“There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” wrote Walter Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History. Pay attention to the post-Enlightenment musical record, and you might decide that there is (almost) no first-rate document of faith that is not at the same time a document of doubt.

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Verdi’s Requiem; Brahms’s German Requiem; Berlioz’s mighty trio of sacred humdingers (L’Enfance du Christ, the Te Deum, the Grande Messe des Morts); those five decades of Vaughan Williams from the Hymnal to Pilgrim’s Progress (about which the composer said “I wanted the idea to be universal and to apply to anybody who aims at the spiritual life”), Benjamin Britten’s lifelong service to church and choir; even Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, written by an artist drifting away from the Catholicism of his youth: questing doubt or overt scepticism often seems not a hindrance but a requirement for the post-Romantic sacred masterpiece.

Beethoven himself wrote his Missa Solemnis after a lifetime’s search for a personal God beyond creed and rite (he read and admired Hindu scriptures). Brahms’s Requiem gloriously defies divine transcendence in favour of human mourning and yearning. When Dvořák, who did keep his Catholic faith, visited his idol, he was aghast: “Such a man, such a fine soul — and he believes in nothing! He believes in nothing!”

Verdi thunderously, and poignantly, celebrates the life of novelist Alessandro Manzoni and rails against death in his Requiem. Its awe and terror came, though, from a spirit with little supernatural anchorage. His wife Giuseppina numbered him among those who while “observing every precept of the highest moral code, are happier believing in nothing”. It vexed her that “this brigand permits himself to be, I won’t say an atheist, but certainly very little of a believer, and that with an obstinacy and calm that make me want to beat him.”

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These testimonies come only from the past two centuries, when doubt and disbelief could find a voice in some Western societies without fearing the cell, rack and pyre — or, at best, social ostracism and professional death. Before that, compulsory piety often draws a veil over private heterodoxy. There’s no reason to doubt the Lutheran devotion that animates every note of Bach. But even that default Christmas blockbuster, Handel’s oratorio Messiah, attracted 18th-century suspicion for its weird choice of Biblical texts and sensational, operatic treatment of their words. One minister denounced it as “no better than a profanation of the name and truths of God”.

Some Christian apologists claim that the music may embody a faith so deep that it can even hide from the conscious mind of its creator. Others resort to the traditional standby of divine inspiration itself. It’s hard to argue with that. Or they may acknowledge that artists can reject dogma, priesthood, ritual and all the paraphernalia of church control while staying true to a spirituality free of walls and laws.

That makes most sense, perhaps. And there’s little evidence that the serial composition of sacred works leads their makers inexorably towards some institutional definition of the one true God. We do know that figures such as Vaughan Williams wrote sacred pieces with utter sincerity as if the scriptures they set were true. Their faith, if it exists, lies within the music, not behind or beyond it.

Nostalgia for the lost certainties of childhood may also drive sacred music from former believers. The church, wrote Berlioz, had given him seven years of youthful joy: “Although we have long since fallen out, I have always kept tender memories of it.” (More pointedly, he calls the Catholicism of his upbringing “this charming religion, so attractive since it gave up burning people”.) Listen to L’Enfance du Christ, with its “Shepherd’s Farewell” that might melt an infidel heart of Dawkins-grade quartz, and that nostalgia has an oceanic force. But if Berlioz had a god, it was William Shakespeare.

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In Britain, the career-long commitment of Vaughan Williams, Britten and Rutter to the renewal of church music did not lead to road-to-Damascus personal revelations. Britten, so his life-partner Peter Pears maintained, remained “an agnostic with a great love for Jesus Christ”.

Herbert Howells, composer of subtly gorgeous Anglican liturgical works (listen, for instance, to his three Christmas Carol-Anthems), lost rather than gained faith as time went by. “People assume he must have been deeply religious,” his wife Ursula reported, “and I have to tell them he wasn’t. He loved the tradition of the church, and the Bible as literature. But he was never more than an agnostic who veered toward belief.”

At this time of year, plenty of people “veer towards belief” for a while. They approach the sublime sentiments of festive showpieces “Hoping it might be so” — as Thomas Hardy’s Christmas Eve poem “The Oxen” puts it. It should comfort them to know that many of these works emerged not out of rock-solid faith but radical uncertainty. Their creators were not hypocrites, dissemblers, or wishy-washy faint-hearts; nor are they.

Earlier this year, John Rutter told a Vatican conference that composers, formal believers or not, may have a sense of faith “because music is a mystery, just as faith is a mystery”. Musicians, he said, “are at home with the transcendental”. Perhaps we should just enjoy the sacred music of the past with a measure of humility about its origins and meaning, then and now. So, not-quite-believers, listen to this year’s live-streamed Midnight Mass with a glad heart and a clear conscience. Honest doubt has built many great cathedrals of sound.

Since Leaving Neverland, aired earlier this month, fans of Michael Jackson have been fiercely defending their hero from the latest round of paedophilia accusations. Yet that documentary merely bolstered what everybody but the most die-hard Jackson fans had known for years. Michael Jackson’s relationship with children was stomach-turning at best, and the rumours were compelling.

Given the court cases and the multi-million dollar pay-offs, it was one of the most open secrets – and scandals – of modern stardom. But, along with his ability to change colour in front of the eyes of the world, the public always made allowances for a simple reason. Michael Jackson gave us “Thriller”, “Bad” and “Billie Jean”.

He’s a clear-cut beneficiary of ‘the genius exemption’. This moral ‘get out of jail free card’ has existed throughout artistic history, it is only now that it appears that the exemption – awkward and compromising as it always was – might itself have become unacceptable.

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Accusations like those made against Michael Jackson would have ended the career of anybody less talented. When similar charges were levelled at Gary Glitter, the world dropped him and his work even before the law had taken its course. It turned out to be remarkably easy to live without “Doing alright with the boys” and “I’m the leader of the gang (I am)”. Whereas it is hard, if not impossible, to imagine any radio station, wedding or birthday disco where Michael Jackson’s back-catalogue would be put onto the same ‘do not play’ list as Gary Glitter’s.

The social forces working behind the genius get-out are fascinating, not least because they are so rarely aired. There has, though, at least since the idea of ‘the artist’ came about, been some tacit recognition that artists are allowed to behave slightly differently from everybody else, and that truly great artists can be forgiven anything short of (though occasionally including) murder.

One obvious contemporary recipient of the genius exemption is Roman Polanski, who has been allowed to continue his career on the run from American justice. There is some sympathy for his past history (Holocaust survivor, murdered wife), but mainly he continues because he is reckoned in the film industry to be a director of genius. In almost no other area of life would somebody be able to survive accusations of child-rape. An accountant would not. Nor a solicitor, politician or small-business owner. But if the person is thought to have crossed a certain threshold of artistic greatness, almost anything is allowed.

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Cultural history is littered with people who have got off the most serious charges imaginable solely because of their greatness. Richard Wagner survives the anti-Semitism because it is impossible to erase him from musical history and because if you have written Tristan and The Ring people will err towards leniency. Ezra Pound wavers, his poetic reputation going down again in recent years, but if he hadn’t often had the air of genius about him, he would not have survived his own fascist political affiliations. Likewise Celine (Louis-Ferdinand, not Dion) whose fascism can be overlooked, if not forgiven, because of Journey to the end of the Night.

If there is a reason why the exemption is so little discussed, it is because it suggests that even the most non-negotiable taboos are more contingent than we would like to admit.  But the whole thing is contingent on unquantifiable factors. For example, there is ongoing indecision about what behaviour ranks where in the lists of iniquity and who exactly counts as a genius. People drift in and out of immunity based on very unclear criteria.

For decades, Woody Allen was immune to almost any and all accusations against him because of Annie Hall. He was even forgiven for every film since. But at present his own genius opt-out appears to be up for reconsideration because of fresh claims about long-ago aspects of his private life. It is a familiar problem. At various times in recent decades, Oscar Wilde’s reputation has again teetered on a ledge for similar reasons. Today, when anybody mentions the rent boys and their age, defenders of Wilde understandably stress their counter-arguments. In truth, it has simply become recognised that we cannot do without the greatest comedies in the English language. So small evasions are permitted.

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But it is a messy moral business. Until John Bridcut settled the matter a decade ago, Benjamin Britten seemed always to be at risk of a Michael Jackson-like fall. In fact, his own relationships with children turn out never to have crossed over any physical line. But there was definitely a sense of near-terror around the subject for many years. Britten could not be written out of musical history. Like Wagner, we could not do without his music. And like Wagner the accusation against him was not completely divorced from the inspiration behind some of his music, but was actually embedded within great chunks of it.

If Britten had been proved to have abused a child both The Turn of the Screw and Death in Venice would have become unperformable. The innocent verdict means we do not have to live with the cognitive dissonance which would come from not doing without his work and not condoning the worst taboos.

Eric Gill turned out to be more easily disposable when his vices (paedophilia, incest, bestiality) came to light. But although his work is still in the Tate and other places, there was definitely a sense that we could ditch Gill if we had to. But these things work in mysterious ways. In popular culture, Michael Jackson inhabits the position of a great artist rather than a disposable one. And that is why the announcement by BBC Radio 2, among others, that they will no longer be playing his music is such a watershed moment.

I suspect that the ban will not last. It will stay for a time before certain early tracks creep back. When a Michael Jackson track comes on at a party, it may for a while be the subject of dark jokes and a bit of comment. But that will recede and people will go on dancing, parking the behaviour of the artist at the back of their mind.

Just one more example of the dissonance which people of talent have always provoked, and the moral exemptions we uncomfortably permit them in gratitude.