Unfinished Music
Richard Kramer
Reviews and Awards
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2009
"This extraordinary book provides a unitary experience, revealing a deep and special perspective on classical music and style. It should be required reading for anyone studying or interested in 18th-century music."--CHOICE
"Richard Kramer's Unfinished Music is a work of great daring and vast erudition, rich in profundities, and overflowing with striking insights into the deepest levels of musical significance. The range of topics is astonishing--fantasia, cadenza, variation; sketches, fragments, improvisations; narrativity, beauty, late style. Music willingly yields its most closely-held secrets to Kramer's sensitive ear and probing mind."--Maynard Solomon, author of Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination
"Richard Kramer's profound meditations on music from 1770 to 1828 are wonderful reading for all music-lovers who care about Beethoven and Schubert, and indispensable for an understanding of the vital importance of Carl Philip Emanuel Bach for Mozart and Beethoven."--Charles Rosen, author of Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen
"Unfinished Music creates and sustains a distinctive critical discourse. In his quest to recognize the elusive moment of artistic intuition, to be knowingly alive to what cannot be known, Richard Kramer reanimates a profound impulse from the twilight of the Enlightenment. The result is a beautifully heard performance that engages every piece of evidence--philosophical, literary, musical--with the same combination of imaginative address and exacting grasp."--Scott Burnham, Professor of Music, Princeton University
"By the concluding page of Unfinished Music, [Kramer] has succeeded in demonstrating that while the work of art may well be the death mask of intuition and conception alike, it also "masks in these two contradictory senses, concealing, altering, disguising the throe of intuition even as it reveals, limits, sets the work in some formal language that allows of its apprehension" (p. 379). For this, and for many other enlivening insights found throughout this remarkable piece of criticism, we can be grateful." --Dennis F. Mahoney, Journal of the American Musicological Society
"[A] remarkable piece of criticism." --Journal of the American Musicological Society