Unfinished Music

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Part I: First Things
1. Language and the Beginnings of Creation
Part II: Emanuel Bach and the Allure of the Irrational
2. Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach and the Aesthetics of Patricide
3. The Ends of Veranderung
4. Late Works
5. Probestuck
6. Diderot's Paraodxe and C.P.E. Bach's Empfindungen
Part III: Between Enlightenment and Romance
7. Hayden's Chaos and Herder's Logos
8. Beethoven and the Romance of Creation
Part IV: Beethoven: Confronting the Past
9. Cadenza Contra Text: Mozart in Beethoven's Hands
10. Opus 90: In Search of Emanuel Bach
11. Adagio espresivo: Opus 109 as Radical Dialectic
12. Lisch aus, mein Licht: Song, Fugue, and the Symptoms of a Late Style
Part V: Fragments
13. Toward an Epistemology of a Fragment
14. Reliquie
Part VI: Death Masks
15. Walter Benjamin and the Apprehending of Beauty
List of Works Cited
Index

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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.

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