Unfinished Music

Unfinished Music draws its inspiration from the riddling aphorism by Walter Benjamin that serves as its epigraph: "the work is the death mask of its conception." The work in its finished, perfected state conceals the enlivening process engaged in its creation. Author Richard Kramer moves from some explosive ideas of J. G. Hamann,, on the place of language at the seat of thought, to explore the no less radical music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, whose bold idiosyncrasies, like Hamann's, disrupted the discourse of Enlightenment aesthetics. In several chapters on the late music of Beethoven, Bach reappears, a spiritual alter ego in the search for a new voice. Music seductively unfinished lies at the center of the book: unstudied late sketches, finally rejected, for a famous quartet movement by Beethoven; the enigmas set loose in several remarkable Mozart fragments; the romanticizing of fragment and its bearing on two important sonatas that Schubert left incomplete. Finally, the author returns to Benjamin's epigraph, drawing together his essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities, Mann's Death in Venice, and the draft for a difficult passage in the andantino of Schubert's Sonata in A (1828).

Unfinished Music explores with subtle insight the uneasy relationship between the finished work and the elusive, provocative traces of the profound labors buried in its past. The book will appeal to music scholars, theorists and performers , indeed to all for whom music is integral to the history of ideas.