 Faris comments that the satire perpetrated by Offenbach and his librettists was cheeky rather than hard-hitting, and Richard Taruskin in his study of 19th-century music observes, "The calculated licentiousness and feigned sacrilege, which successfully baited the stuffier critics, were recognized by all for what they were – a social palliative, the very opposite of social criticism ...The spectacle of the Olympian gods doing the cancan threatened nobody's dignity.