Very few other minor composers raise the big questions, in Taruskin's account. We hear from Louis Spohr, for example, as a contemporary witness to Beethoven's Fifth and Ninth symphonies, and to Paganini, but of Spohr's own music there is not a whisper. Taruskin is not trying to substitute one canon for another, and the only area in which he criticizes the canon's exclusiveness concerns the omission of women. He mentions recent efforts at "mainstreaming" women composers, and throws his own weight behind Barbara Strozzi, Fanny Mendelssohn and Amy Beach. But the more powerful conclusion he draws is that evident defects in the canon are best answered by a skeptical attitude to all received opinion. If most of the revered masters and masterpieces remain in place here, they do so because their qualities are being freshly judged.

Some, nevertheless, are dented. Taruskin insists--this is one of his central axioms--that the making of music is a social act, done by people for people. And though he asserts that our understanding of music is historically mediated, there may be strains--or rather stains--in the substance of a composition that cannot be ignored or erased. This is why he has little patience for opera seria, the dominant operatic form throughout most of the eighteenth century, which he describes as "an art invested with, and affirming, a social and political system--a system with which no one educated according to the principles of the Enlightenment (which is to say, just about anyone reading this book) could possibly sympathize today." If, three chapters later, an aria from one of Handel's operas in this genre is praised as "a triumph of dramatically structured music," Taruskin, remembering his earlier strictures, claims that Handel "was never a truly typical seria composer." Real opera seria is irremediable, and we should not be surprised to find it lost behind an impenetrable wall, for "the return of the castrato voice would be about as likely or as feasible as the return of public hangings."

But wait. Handel's operas require castrati, as much as do the operas of the "truly typical" suppliers Taruskin discusses in his earlier chapter. Moreover, works by these composers are now being revived to great acclaim. And one may say that the castrati have indeed returned, in the guise of star countertenors and mezzo-soprano cross-dressers who command the virtuosity, the allure and even the sexual mystique of their predecessors. Experiencing them in action, whether in the theater or on record, one has to doubt that their repertory truly affirms the divine right of kings and wonder if it is concerned instead with highly contemporary questions of self-invention and self-projection, of loyalty and deceit, of erotic power play, of love and its guarded frontiers.

Nevertheless, it may be easy to discount the politics of opera seria only because the memory of unquestioned absolute monarchy is so faint. The case is very different with nationalism (especially German nationalism), racism (especially anti-Semitism) and totalitarianism (especially in the Soviet Union and, again, Germany). Sometimes the blot may be an afterthought of history, the advantage of hindsight. Listening, say, to the tenor aria in the Bach cantata Wo Gott der Herr, we may "have greater reason than Bach's contemporaries ever had to wince at the sound of a high-pitched German voice stridently shouting reason down." But there are taints, too, that come from closer to the music's source.

To take another, more celebrated, example from Bach, how should we treat the moment in the St. John Passion where the Jews demand Christ's crucifixion? Is it enough to know that, according to Taruskin, Bach may never have met a Jew, and that he was merely following the Gospel story? Alternatively, as Taruskin puts it, "does Bach's music redeem the text?" (which perhaps it could do only by making us ignore the words being sung). As Taruskin also asks, Should we change the text? And who gets to decide?

And what happens when such problems are raised not by a brief passage in an enormous work but by a composer's whole ethos? We are used, perhaps overused, to the question being raised with respect to Wagner, whose anti-Semitism was an integral part of his worldview and, arguably, of his music theory (the notorious essay "Judaism in Music" being a case in point). But Taruskin also obliges us to think further about Brahms. Tracking Brahms's path toward his First Symphony in a closely considered passage--a characteristically Brahmsian passage in its density of consequence and range of reference--Taruskin draws into account the nationalist imperative behind the composer's absorption of German music from Bach to Wagner, an imperative that erupted in the little-known Triumphlied, which Brahms "reverently dedicated" to the new German Kaiser, Wilhelm I. Clearly, Taruskin wants to share his admiration for "the first major composer who grew up within, and learned to cope with, our modern conception of 'classical music,'" but he wants to convey a certain circumspection.

Perhaps this is the book's chief lesson, that our listening can never be wholly innocent or engulfing, that we cannot fully participate in what Taruskin calls the "music trance," a phenomenon he traces to the early nineteenth century. We no longer have the luxury of letting our guard drop. As Taruskin observes, the catastrophes experienced by the West in the twentieth century--World War I; the totalitarian dictatorships of the century's second quarter, which exacted their cost in further war and genocide; and the development of nuclear weapons--made it impossible to compose without irony. Irony, too, is our lot as listeners.

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