Works set in the Middle and Far East are often placed in ancient times or portray ‘timeless’ rituals; temporal displacements heightened the sense of escapism and also avoided the risk of having an opera comment in too parochial or potentially uncomfortable a manner on current political or imperial realities. Social ideology was nonetheless strongly conveyed, not least through what might be called the archetypal orientalist opera plot: a Western male becomes romantically involved with a local female, who is portrayed as sexually inviting and thereby at once attractive and threatening. (Bizet's Carmen played this story out on European soil; dark-skinned gypsies were understood to have migrated from vaguely eastern regions such as Egypt or India.) How such love relationships were worked out in the course of the opera depended on attitudes at the time towards the possible mingling or inherent incompatibility of different ‘races’ (see Parakilas, 1993–4).