Fragment, sketch, draft, improvisation: these concepts and what they denote – as ambiguous as they may be – take centre stage in Richard Kramer's treatment of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. Nearly half of the fifteen chapters here have already been published as articles. But that is not why the work itself, in a romantic sense, is somewhat fragmentary. Kramer calls attention to a seemingly endless variety of aspects that do more to explain each other, leaving room for reflection, than they do to bolster any particular line of argument. This heuristic approach offers the author a masterful stylistic device. He borrows an aphorism from Walter Benjamin which serves as a foundation, an innere Stimme, for his deliberations throughout the book. It appears in two distinct versions, one emphatic: ‘Every perfect work is the death mask of its intuition’, and the other somewhat less so: ‘The work is the death mask of conception’ (see page 367 for an example of both versions). Such a notion stands in direct opposition to the ideas of fragment, sketch, draft and improvisation, all of which bear witness to processes of intuition and conception. On the subject of fragments, Kramer uses another aphorism, this time from Friedrich Schlegel, to make an emphatic point, now coming full circle: ‘Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at birth’ (311). Thus the fragmentary character of the ‘works of the moderns’ may be understood in two different ways: as internally unfinished and without end while externally whole, or as the impossibility of coming to a final external conclusion. Unfinished Music presents a series of approaches to this dual idea of modern romantic fragments.

Kramer divides the fifteen chapters of his book into six parts: ‘First Things: Language and the Beginnings of Creation’ (3–22), ‘Emanuel Bach and the Allure of the Irrational’ (23–150), ‘Between Enlightenment and Romance’ (151–208), ‘Beethoven: Confronting the Past’ (209–308), ‘Fragments’ (309–364) and ‘Death Masks’ (365–379). Parts one and six, each consisting of one chapter, establish a framework, outlining the concept of fragment and the idea of work as a death mask. Parts two to five, which range from Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach to Schubert, place a sequence of works within this framework for successive contemplation.

In ‘Emanuel Bach and the Allure of the Irrational’ Kramer begins with musings, themselves fragmentary, over ‘Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and the Aesthetics of Patricide’ (25–46). Thereafter, he uses this part of the book to seek a relationship between composed work (text) on the one hand, and ideas of performance and improvisation under the conditions of the Empfindsamkeit era on the other. Chapter three (‘The Ends of Veränderung’), for example, deals with the relationship between the written Veränderungen – primarily intended to show Liebhaber how the piece ought to be played – and the unadorned composition in Bach's Sechs Sonaten für Clavier mit veränderten Reprisen Wq50 (Berlin: Winter, 1760). Kramer uses this as a model for the emergence of composition from the improvisatory practice of variation, as demonstrated by his comparison of bars 10–11 and 21–22 in the first movement of the Sonata in F major Wq50 No. 1 (h136), which leads him to conclude: ‘Such relationships, born in the practice of Veränderung, are about composition in its deepest sense. Without them, the piece is flat, its story untold. It would be a very short story indeed: in its formal brevity, the movement seems to have been conceived so that its thematic fullness is actually dependent on the varied reprises’ (58).

Part three, ‘Between Enlightenment and Romance’, gives an interpretation of the Vorstellung des Chaos at the beginning of Haydn's Die Schöpfung, followed by a chapter containing two brief discussions of Beethoven. Drawing on reflections from chapter one on Johann Georg Hamann's Sprachphilosophie and Vernunftkritik, Kramer analyses Haydn's Chaos as a composed search for language and its expression, thereby dissociating it from romantic concepts of infinity and the sublime, as well as from Heinrich Schenker's analysis of the piece as an organic process of development towards the climactic chord that concludes Haydn's setting of the words ‘Und es ward Licht’ (And there was light). The chapter on Beethoven focuses on two paradoxes: firstly, the relationship between intended (programmatic) meaning in the sketches for the so-called ‘Romeo and Juliet’ theme in the Adagio affettuoso ed appassionato of the String Quartet in F major Op. 18 No. 1, and the eventual musical contents of the movement; and secondly, the notion of ‘sketching the improvisatory’ (184) in the composition of the first movement of the Piano Sonata in D minor, Op. 31 No. 2.

The two chapters at the heart of part four (‘Beethoven: Confronting the Past’) cover the Piano Sonata in E minor, Op. 90 (‘Opus 90: In Search of Emanuel Bach’), and the first movement of the Piano Sonata in E major Op. 109 (‘Adagio espressivo: Opus 109 as Radical Dialectic’). They return to a notion of late style already discussed in part two, which culminated in a discussion of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Beethoven's interest in the work of Emanuel Bach is well known: at least twice he asked Breitkopf & Härtel to send him the complete works, and he used Bach's Versuch über die wahre Art, das Clavier zu spielen in teaching. The commentary on Op. 90 concentrates on its introverted handling of materials, which Kramer interprets as a point of contact between Emanuel Bach and Beethoven's late style; he perceives this primarily as a transformation of musical Empfindsamkeit in the late classical sonata as composed by Beethoven. The discussion of how the idea of fantasy as a sentimental genre is absorbed into the later sonata is of special interest, as are the remarks concerning the sentimental qualities of the clavichord in Bach's music and Beethoven's later evocation of this same sensibility by means of specific playing techniques and notational conceits (as in the section marked ‘Recitativo’ in the third movement of the Sonata in A flat major Op. 110).

‘Fragments’, the last part of the book to deal with compositions, first considers a number of Mozart's fragmentary works. Kramer ponders whether these fragments – unfinished first movements – may in fact point to the impossibility of completion. Schubert's ‘Reliquie’, the unfinished Sonata in C major d840 from 1825, is also a fragment, from an external perspective. Both the Menuetto and Finale end prematurely, mid-movement. The first movement and slow movement, on the other hand, are outwardly complete. Nevertheless, Kramer understands these movements as clear examples – and here he comes to his grand conclusion – of romantic fragments, outwardly complete and yet internally unfinished: ‘the finished work as the suggestion of something unfinished’ (358). For Kramer, the decisive criterion lies in the tonal construction of the beginning of the reprise, in avoiding the emphatic return of the tonic.

Unfinished Music is as fascinating as it is vexing. The book is rich in philological and analytical detail. Aspects of tonal language, and the boundaries to which it is pushed in improvisations and fragments (external as well as internal), while near-ubiquitous in themselves, are just some among the many common threads that are woven throughout the fabric of the book. There are also the manifold approaches to the phenomena of fragment, sketch, draft and improvisation, which function as counterparts to the notion of the death mask of the work. The peculiar and often speculative – in both a good and a bad sense – connection presented between philology and the history of ideas here offers more questions than answers, which, perhaps, is no small contribution from a single book. Its postmodern nature arises not least from the fact that it takes on a similar character to the subject at hand: as a piece of literature, Unfinished Music is outwardly complete, yet internally, with its circular argumentation and ambiguous language, it is closer to being a romantic fragment itself.