Unfinished Music

From the riddling aphorism by Walter Benjamin with which the book opens, Unfinished Music explores with subtle insight the uneasy relationship between the finished work and the elusive, provocative traces of the imponderable labors buried in its past. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach is a central player here, and his presence is deeply felt in studies of Beethoven's late music. Music seductively unfinished is the topic of chapters on sketches by Beethoven, fragments by Mozart, and on two important sonatas that Schubert left resoundingly incomplete.