‘It all might just as well have turned out differently’, writes Christoph Wolff of Mozart's life and death (3). Wolff's professed aim here is to deal with the last three years of Mozart's career not as the valedictory culmination so beloved of the old scholarly-literary tradition – a series of underappreciated masterworks providing the soundtrack to a sudden decline in the composer's health and wealth – but as a period full of promise: plans were laid, never to be acted upon; paths opened up, never to be taken. Death, so necessary in the standard Mozart story, is surely the ultimate case of historical contingency. Granted, the story from which Wolff announces his deviation is by now so corny that it is barely standard any more: scholars long ago sought to retell parts of it with a critical eye on the romantic assumptions of early twentieth-century opinion-formers such as Alfred Einstein. Wolff's rather belated revisionism nevertheless amounts to a fresh scholarly contribution to the extent that it implicitly advances a counterfactual argument: had he lived, Mozart's career would have been illustrious indeed, partly because of strong continuing support from the imperial court. Wolff fleshes out this claim with a deftly assembled range of historical data.

The institutional history with which Wolff begins is crucial to his story, since it describes the social networks and political hierarchies that would have guaranteed Mozart's later success. Wolff, unlike many Mozart scholars before him, grants particular importance to the 1787 decree that made Mozart Kompositor of the imperial chamber music. He also makes much of the fact that Mozart was, early in 1791, granted the position of adjunct to the elderly Kapellmeister of St Stephen’s, Leopold Hofmann, with the assurance that he would succeed to the main post once it was vacated (a decision possibly swayed by Mozart's earlier petition to the Archduke Franz that he be made a ‘second Kapellmeister’, implicitly specializing in church music). The second chapter adds to the story of Mozart's burgeoning institutional success by showing how he had begun to cultivate connections outside of Vienna in the course of trips to Leipzig and Berlin (in 1789) and Frankfurt (for the coronation of Leopold II in 1790). Though these trips were largely a case of molto onor, poco contante, Wolff argues that Mozart was correct to see them as laying the foundations of future success.

Wolff by and large marshalls his historical evidence persuasively and responsibly in telling this story. Yet he is noticeably less careful once Mozart sojourns in Leipzig and the scholarly attractions of the Bach myth prove irresistible. This is a pity, not least because a study like this, which aims to be read more widely than most musicological books, can do a great deal to change popular misconceptions and received opinion. Since the late sixties, scholars of eighteenth-century music have repeatedly exposed the dubious cultural politics and historiographically distorting effects of our discipline's desire for Mozart and Bach to have had a momentous trans-historical handshake of some kind. Yet, in the face of all that, Wolff goes as far as any serious scholar to date in affirming that Mozart had – to borrow the slogan of Einstein's venerable Mozart study – a ‘Bach experience’. Wolff goes further still and speaks of a Viennese ‘Bach circle’ – a tendentious formulation, to say the least, which can only be sustained by a decidedly partial reading of the available sources. Thus early Bach reception in Vienna and the incipient culture of Bach veneration in Leipzig never appear as the local, textured and variegated things that they were: small elements in a broader trend towards greater historical awareness in late eighteenth-century musical institutions and aesthetics. Besides, as other scholars have pointed out, if one insists on couching Mozart's nascent historical sense in the limiting terms of a transformative encounter with an earlier German genius, there is vastly more evidence for a ‘Handel experience’ – much of it relayed by Wolff's book, in fact, which scrupulously avoids connecting the dots. Indeed, decades of musicological research have shown that Handel reception was the catalyst for precisely the kind of great-man music historiography that Wolff's superannuated version of the Bach experience perpetuates.

Part of the reason for this blind spot is that Wolff in essence retells the story of Viennese classicism formulated so long ago by musicological founding fathers such as Adolf Sandberger. In this tale, ‘Bach’ always equals ‘complex textures and contrapuntal devices’ (72), the tools that supposedly elevated (and Germanized) the Italianate language that Mozart inherited. Handel, in this discredited historiography, is typically treated with mild disdain – as a superficial quasi-Italian. Thus, even though Wolff details the many concrete debts to Handel long noted in the Requiem, he concludes that Mozart ‘far outreaches’ his Handelian models in a poorly defined quality called ‘refined compositional accomplishment as a whole’ (155). At the same time, on the basis of scant evidence, Wolff advances the curiously conditional claim that ‘Mozart could regard Bach as an exemplary model for a forward-looking style of vocal polyphony’ (156).

Fortunately, Mozart's supposed Bach experience does not shape all of the musical discussion in the book. In the course of three central chapters devoted to instrumental works, operatic composition and church music respectively, Wolff seeks to describe the stylistic directions that Mozart had begun to pursue in his last years. The guiding idea is Mozart's increased compositional ambition – a grandness of scope, self-conscious experimentalism and technical complexity – that was fuelled by his newly prominent official positions, and his desire to make good on the exposure that they afforded him. Wolff coins an umbrella term for the family of tendencies in Mozart's music after 1787: the ‘imperial style’. To be sure, one wonders whether Mozart really needs to be furnished with a ‘crowning’ register in the manner of Beethoven's heroic style – and, indeed, whether such labels don't produce as much critical blindness as insight. For all that, it seems to me a potentially valuable heuristic device: first, because it highlights how stylistic changes in Mozart's music can be linked to changes in his social status and, second, because it creates a single category for those aspects of Mozart's last music that, broadly speaking, seem to stand on the threshold between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetic outlooks. The idea of the imperial style is also capacious enough to include genres not typically associated with grand public statements; it prompts, for example, a valuable analysis of the unusually knotty piano sonata k533 (78–84).

One danger here, however, which Wolff does not try to avert, is that claims for the unique status of Mozart's music after 1787 too easily shade into a reaffirmation of the values and language of Mozart's romantic reception. It is jarring in this context to read a long quotation from E. T. A. Hoffmann's essay on ‘Old and New Church Music’ (first published in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (31 August, and 7 and 14 September 1814)), cited not to illustrate the drastically changed conditions of Mozart's reception among German romantics, but as straightforward evidence that Mozart had created ‘a new kind of sacred music’ (149). That Wolff is content to reproduce Hoffmann's values so uncritically might explain why he also tends to invoke Haydn only in the familiar role of precursor to Mozart's greater achievements. ‘Innovation’ is the constant watchword of these discussions, and Wolff continually deploys it and its cognates as terms of approval, without exploring how or why the values of originality and novelty – which were by no means central to Mozart's musical training or mature aesthetic outlook, even though Wolff extols Mozart's ‘tendency to transgress conventional limits’ (193) – might have become increasingly important towards the end of the eighteenth century.

It is in the concluding chapter, however, devoted to the music that Mozart left unfinished, that Wolff's debts to the romantic critical tradition are most in evidence, since his discussion reanimates a hoary and extremely dubious view of the uniqueness of Mozart's compositional process: Mozart, in a singular and untaught way, had ‘a method of designing and thinking through an entire piece of music before committing to paper what was literally engraved in his mind’ (161). The strange use of the word ‘literally’ in this sentence gives a good sense of the sophistication of the theory of cognition that underlies this claim. Certainly Wolff doesn't mention the letters attributed to Mozart, published in 1815, in which precisely this method of composition was first described and popularized – presumably because he knows that they were forgeries, probably by Friedrich Rochlitz, that expressed a decidedly wishful view of the romantic genius. It strikes me that Wolff's thinking is equally wishful here. Scholars have known for some time that Mozart sketched – although its full extent is inevitably a matter of speculation, given that he lived in an era when the sketches of geniuses were not yet systematically retained or pored over as holy relics. Moreover, it is hard to imagine, given what we know of eighteenth-century keyboard culture and musical training, that Mozart of all people didn't discover ideas and elaborate them predominantly by improvising at the keyboard. But Wolff is disdainful of music that is ‘merely improvised’ (159), and insists on a strict distinction between musical works ‘proper’ and things produced in what he calls a ‘play-as-you-go manner’ (160): when Mozart composed it was a largely disembodied process, proceeding directly from the mind to the written page. Thus, at the end of his book, Wolff's project is not to draw sophisticated inferences from works-in-progress as much as vainly to re-imagine completed works that died along with Mozart himself, locked within his brain. The final illustration depicts empty staves on Mozart's manuscript paper: the resonant absence of things composed, but not yet set down.

There is doubtless a poignancy to this overtly Keatsian conclusion: the tantalizing thought, shared by any historical musicologist, of melodies unheard, of music that might have been. But this conclusion is also revealing of Wolff's scholarly priorities: music by Mozart that will never fall on our ears is sweeter than music by his many contemporaries that we can actually encounter. Mozart is what really counts – even the inaudible stuff. Wolff is a historian, yet one who by and large focuses on what ‘set Mozart apart from even his most distinguished contemporaries’ (162), not on the many continuities between them. Mozart was certainly exceptional; there is no argument about that. Still, I wonder whether we might not learn more about his music from listening carefully to these contemporaries and learning about how they worked than by hunting the Snark of an imagined masterpiece by Mozart that we can never hear. After all, an autograph fragment should be the very quintessence of the contingency that Wolff appears, at the start of his book, to be reviving: things are still in medias res, being negotiated, in flux. It all might just as well have turned out differently.