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.

Öffers kam Mozart zum Schack, um ihn zu einem Spaziergang abzuholen, und während Schack derselbe ankleidete, setzte sich Kapellmeister Mozart an dessen Schreibtisch und komponirte hier und da ein Stück in desselben Opern; daher in des Schack Opern mehrere Stellen von Mozarts eigener Hand und Genie vorkommen.

This essay examines the story of two stories, both by Richard Wagner: a story of Lohengrin, knight of the Holy Grail, and of Lohengrin, the opera. Lohengrin's story is well known: Elsa of Brabant, accused by her former suitor Friedrich of Telramund of having killed her brother and heir to the throne, prays for help from the unknown knight in her dreams, promising herself as wife in exchange for his assistance. Miraculously, the knight appears in a boat pulled by a swan and accepts her offer on condition that she never ask about his origin, name or nature. But political and personal intrigue spun by Friedrich and the gypsy woman Ortrud nourish doubts about the knight's magical existence, doubts that ultimately drive Elsa to ask the forbidden question during her wedding night. Lohengrin publicly discloses his identity and leaves Elsa, though not without returning her brother (whom Ortrud had transformed into the swan) to power.

Five women have been blinded by the darkness of Bluebeard's castle, each punished for the same fatal curiosity, the same whimsical refusal to obey her husband. Roaming in a vague, useless search for freedom, unable — perhaps unwilling—to find a way of escape, they can no longer remember how long they have been captive, and have even forgotten their vanity. It seems they will wait forever.

Among surviving portraits of Augusta Holmès is a photograph taken towards the end of her life (Fig. 1). The setting is her home: possibly the main room, but more likely a study, since the picture is dominated by a grand piano at which the composer stands imperiously. Images such as this – emphasising professional zeal rather than feminine charm – were the exception in the representation of women composers at the end of the nineteenth century. A vase of flowers, a flowing gown and a recumbent posture would have been typical. In high-necked blouse and dark skirt, hair pulled back severely to reveal a large, pale face, Holmès is less alluring; but she is ready to compose. The image also engages with contemporary conventions of representing male composers. Within the photograph is another, a framed portrait on the piano, positioned so that it reproduces Holmès' features. Richard Wagner: same bushy cravat, same forbidding pose. Almost the same, but not quite.

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.

Roland Barthes discusses a postmodern condition in his last book, Camera Lucida: everything is signified and visible, and everything has the flatness of the photographic image; even death is rendered platitudinous, flat. If everything can be represented, nothing can be represented that would distinguish it from the mass of images already available; and if everything is for consumption in conditions of distraction, then difference disappears; we are left in a state Barthes calls ‘indifference’. Barthes then looks for the punctum: any point of unrepresentability that will punctuate or pierce the smoothness of the studium (art marked out by completeness, by total visibility). The punctum, by its wounding quality, would be a signifier pointing to something outside representation, outside the studium, and inasmuch as opera in the condition of postmodernism is likely to be a saturated medium, absorbed by viewers and listeners in conditions of distraction, the question arises, what punctum could it bear? There is, of course, nothing that could be isolated as such: it is, rather, that which by being outside representation appeals to what might be called–adapting Walter Benjamin's sense of photography as pointing to an ‘optical unconscious’ – an ‘aural unconscious’ just outside the text.

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.

Propped up in his bed, for all the world the quintessential fin-de-siècle invalid, Marcel Proust listened to the perplexing sound of music far away. He heard it from beyond the walls of his room, through a connecting tube: the famous théâtrophone, a permanent subscription telephone line that could connect Proust's apartment in the boulevard Haussmann to a number of Parisian theatres, opera houses and concert halls. The operatic scenes that succeeded in penetrating those walls were not scenes at all: they were disembodied voices, issuing instructions for the visual imagination. Those moments that progressed further — onto the pages of A la recherche du temps perdu — were of course even less corporeal: both invisible and soundless. In the passage from opera house to author to novel, who can say how much was lost? All that remains are words, hundreds of thousands of them, pouring noiselessly into a space where the music has sunk without trace; the fevered patient added reams more supplementary material (inflations, substitutions, emendations) as fast as the opera came in through the wall, papering — soundproofing — the room with words.

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.

Stories, whether true or calculatedly false, have played at best an ancillary role in the evolution of Berio's approach to musical theatre. Indeed, to find a straightforward example of story-telling in his output, one would have to go back some twenty years from La vera storia to his previous collaboration with Italo Calvino, Allez Hop (1959), an ironic parable narrated in mime. But as soon as subsequent commissions offered Berio the resources of the human voice, he turned away from the seductions of a central narrative core, and instead built his vision of the potential of musical theatre around a more allusive and multi-layered conception. Narratives are still skeletally present – for instance, in Passaggio (1962), which employs the barest outlines of a scenario, spelt out explicidy only at the end, as a frame on which to hang a complex web of poetic and theatrical imagery, or indeed Opera (1970), with its intertwining myths of the ancient and modern worlds evoked through concentrated imagery, but not acted out. But the narrative twists and turns that are the chief pleasure of the story-teller – and the chief impetus behind the lyric outbursts of the operatic tradition – were no longer his concern.

Siena 1880. During his penultimate trip to Italy, Richard Wagner stayed for nearly two months in the neighbourhood of Siena. He was completing the orchestration of Parsifal, and went one day to visit the cathedral. Hardly had he got inside when he dissolved into tears, exclaiming ‘this the Temple of the Grail’. And indeed, if you look at the stage designs for the third act of Parsifal as they were prepared for the first performance at Bayreuth in 1882, you will find that the Temple of the Grail does in fact open on to a fairly faithful reconstruction of the interior of this city's exceptionally beautiful cathedral.

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.