It seems fair to say that we are enmeshed in an Age of Reconstruction. Whatever groans the shibboleth of ‘authenticity’ may elicit from musicians and musicologists, the film industry's leap for the bandwagon is proof of the principle that Period Pieces Pay. Of the recent spate of feature films set in the eighteenth century, one in particular has marketed itself through its reconstructive credentials. The technologies that allow us to remodel our bodies, and revive old recordings on compact disc, also allowed the makers of Farinelli, Il Castrato to reach back and breathe new life into the voice of the long-dead castrati.

And so yet again we are to consider the Russianness of Russian music. Is there some peculiar shortcoming afflicting Russian music that prevents us from discussing it except in terms of nationality? Although Richard Taruskin has asked why we cannot simply take Russian music out of the surrounding nationalist discourse in order to examine it per se, such an approach may require, even as a precondition, a radically revisionary account of the music's highly mythologised history. So much critical' writing, so many articles, monographs and textbooks of the last 150 years cannot blithely be set aside: they continue to feed programme and liner notes, encouraging and reinforcing audiences' fond belief in an intrinsic Russianness that mysteriously subsists beneath every note of this perennially popular repertoire.

In February of 1929, the German National Party raised a matter of pressing concern in the Prussian State Parliament: the party requested a parliamentary investigation into ‘the transformation of the State Opera at the Platz der Deutschen Republik (popularly known as the Kroll Opera) into a laboratory for Bolshevik art experiments’. The crisis had become particularly acute in the wake of the Kroll Opera's production of Der fliegende Holländer, which had been premièred a few weeks earlier on 15 January 1929 and which, according to the party, brazenly ‘mocked the spirit of Richard Wagner’. For anyone who has worked on Wagner or, for that matter, simply attended performances of his works, the sentiments come as no surprise. Indeed, the fact that they arose in the wake of Otto Klemperer's and Jiirgen Fehling's famously abstract production (with sets by Ewald Dülberg) make them almost predictable. Fehling and Klemperer incurred the wrath of the National Party for producing what I want to call a ‘critical reading’ of Wagner's text. In Klemperer's and Fehling's reading, the Dutchman's ship may be anchored in the mid-nineteenth century, but it is not permanently mired there. And that is precisely what enraged the National Party, just as years later Patrice Chereau would incur the wrath of countless like-minded Wagnerians, whose recourse to the official channels of government for the redress of their aesthetic grievances was, however, no longer so direct.

How can Wagner simultaneously herald modernism, express the quintessence of romanticism and evoke primeval experience? This question is illuminated by the constellation of advanced production and desire that Walter Benjamin finds in the process of commodity manufacture, dwelling on the tendency for new technologies to create repetitive conformity while recognising their capacity to trigger unfulfilled prospects in older forms of knowledge. When, however, Adorno frames the dilemma posed by Wagner he finds mythic deception, not a release of archaic subjectivity. These two currents in modernity cannot be easily segregated, but reading Adorno's Wagner through Benjamin's appraisal of modernity facilitates a more sanguine interpretation of Wagner's evocation of ur-forms through advanced compositional technology. The rigidity of Adorno's interpretation is further softened by Jacques Derrida's reading of Karl Marx's distinction between use-value and exchange-value, while, on a broader front, Derrida's attention to the reader also suggests that commodity production need not dominate reception strategies. Indeed, Adorno, in an essay on film first published in 1966, acknowledges that intention and effect frequently do not coincide.

In my review of Frederic Spotts' Bajreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival (this journal, 7 [1995], 277–84), differing editions of a key text led me to claim that many more citations were incorrect than was actually the case. Although diis does not affect my basic point about the inadequacy of the citation style in general, I apologise to Dr Spotts for the confusion.