This article reflects on our research team’s attempts to set to music and perform excerpts from Le Verfügbar aux Enfers for research purposes. We address decisions that have been made during the process and applied in different contexts of musical performance. First, we explore general issues that were raised by our attempts to set the manuscript to music: we question the legitimacy of an interpretation of the opérette-revue, as well as the ambivalent character of this approach, located somewhere between creation and reconstitution. Second, we discuss specific musical examples from Le Verfügbar aux Enfers, in order to highlight some of the dilemmas we have faced when confronted with the actual musical numbers. The issues presented here are thus of ethical as well as of methodological nature.