Scott Burnham tackles a seemingly impossible task: explaining ‘what is so special about the sound of Mozart’ (p. 7). What musical features account for its ‘effortless’ and ‘touching’ beauty (p. 4 and p. 35)? Why does it evoke sensations of trust, wonder and joy in listeners? Much to the delight of readers, Burnham succeeds.

Burnham addresses the above questions through detailed analyses presented in accessible, vivid language. He employs some of Mozart’s most famous and beloved pieces as examples. Passages from ‘Ave verum corpus’, the Gran Partita, Symphony No. 40, the overture to Don Giovanni, and well known piano concertos and sonatas reveal what musical techniques contribute to listeners’ rapturous responses. Instrumental works dominate the discussion. This allows Burnham to focus primarily on musical parameters, such as rhythm, harmony, texture, timbre and form, rather than textual issues, and thus keep Mozart’s distinctive sound at the forefront. Because many of the musical selections are well known and in slow tempi, those who are quite familiar with Mozart’s oeuvre will be able to readily ‘hear’ these passages in their minds, while other readers can easily locate recordings if they wish. Additionally many substantial score excerpts accompany the author’s elegant prose descriptions.

How Mozart transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary forms one of the book’s overarching themes. Again and again, Burnham’s analyses show how the composer turns the conventional into graceful and eloquent music. The pristine opening bars of the Adagio of the Clarinet Concerto, for example, are very straightforward. Tonic and dominant harmonies underpin four-bar phrases. Yet an active accompaniment under a sustained melody combine with slight changes in instrumentation and a pedal point in the viola to create a sense of ‘exquisite tension … [and] animated stillness’ (p. 10). Similarly, unexpected prolongations of what ordinarily would be grace notes make the opening melodies of K 332/ii and K 467/ii memorable and expressive. Burnham also sheds light on the importance of small details – the re-voicing of a chord, an upper voice that begins and ends a beat early, the lack of rests in a 12-bar phrase – to a passage’s overall effect. For instance, the first movement of Symphony No. 40 contains a biting dissonance scored so gently ‘one hears it not as a dissonance but as a slight disturbance of the air’ (pp. 80–81). Throughout the book similarly deft metaphors and imagery capture the impact of specific musical gestures.

The word ‘grace’ encompasses a variety of meanings. In Burnham’s study, it refers to the music’s beauty of line and motion (the primary topic of Chapter 1), and also to grace as a spiritual concept: a miraculous gift that enlightens and uplifts the soul. As the author notes in the introduction, numerous composers, theologians and musicologists have linked the composer’s music with perfection and the divine. Chapter 2 of the book examines how Mozart’s music conveys interiority and ‘summon[s]’ both the sacred and the demonic (p. 37). The latter often arises from sudden ruptures from the prevailing atmosphere, such as when the C-minor Fantasia (K 475) abruptly shifts tempo and mood. Interiority, on the other hand, usually emerges from modulating towards the subdominant or flat side. ‘Explorations of the flat side’, explains Burnham, seem ‘to move within the key’ rather than veer away from it and therefore ‘speak of its inner depths. This is partially because the flat side is the side of the minor mode, through which the major mode can be expressively enriched without even changing its key center’ (p. 103–4). Thus it can signal ‘revelations of an interior state’ (p. 109) or a ‘deeper consciousness’ (p. 102) and sometimes even a state of prayer.

The author also demonstrates how subtly altering straightforward gestures can lead to supra-natural intimations, both sacred and profane. Harmony alone does not explain the disturbing nature of the overture to Don Giovanni, asserts Burnham. Rather it is the combination of ‘the most common imaginable melodic pattern’, scales, with ‘unusual chromatic harmonies’ that makes it so unsettling (p. 45). Customarily, when composers transform diminished seventh chords into dominant sevenths one voice descends while the others remain in place. During the ‘Confutatis’ of the Requiem Mozart does the opposite: one voice holds steady while the other three ascend, which gives the impression that the earth mysteriously rises in response to the choir’s pleas for eternal salvation.

But why, despite its association with divine perfection and the otherworldly, is Mozart’s music not ‘off-putting’ (p. 3)? Burnham attributes this in part to Mozart’s ability to create what the author calls a ‘sonic community’ (p. 19). Each part serves a distinctive function within the musical texture, yet is self-sufficient and pleasant enough to play or hear on its own. Grace then includes working congenially together, a quality that explains why Mozart’s music appeals to listeners and performers alike.

Late in the volume, Burnham’s close musical analyses open out onto larger cultural issues and aesthetic concepts, as he offers a fresh perspective on what makes the Viennese Classical style so enjoyable and enduring. The third and final chapter of Mozart’s Grace focuses primarily on form, particularly how Mozart’s music ‘stages’ reappearances of previously heard musical material (p. 117 and p. 128). Burnham then relates these musical processes to human experience, psychology and spirituality. As the author notes, music analysts often discuss recapitulations in terms of structure and large-scale resolution and generally ignore the ‘psychological effect[s]’ recapitulations and other restatements induce (p. 128). Burnham uses the Andante of the G-major Piano Concerto (K 453) to demonstrate how a returning theme ‘provides the psychological experience of temporal transformation within general stability of character’ (p. 128). The ‘unassuming refrain’ of K 543/ii returns four times (p. 123). Each return is ‘prepared differently’; each repetition ‘leads to a different place’ (p. 117). This and other musical returns transmit a sense of ‘renewal’ that closely resembles our ‘experience of selfhood’ (p. 128). Repetition, restoration and renewal are central to the human condition and to this repertoire. The Classical Style enacts return and renewal on various levels, from parallel periods to entire paragraphs and keys, which ‘collect and release the music around them’ (p. 126). Accumulated experience colours how we respond to recurrences, including the various restatements contained within K 453. The return of an opening theme, for example, ‘triggers a welcome flush of recognition, not just because it is familiar but because it is fresh all over again’ (p. 128).

Burnham also touches on how and why Mozart’s music differs from that of the next generation. Mozart’s dissonances are just as bold as Beethoven’s, for example, but usually arise from a linear sequence, so we perceive them as less harsh. More importantly, Mozart’s music offers different, less determinedly teleological narratives than Beethoven. Light does not always triumph over darkness; instead the two elements are natural and necessary companions. To Burnham, Mozart’s music suggests that human experience incorporates the comic and the tragic, mundane ephemera as well the eternal. At times life shifts quickly from one to the other, as internal and external forces influence its course. We hear comparable, sometimes quite startling, shifts in Mozart’s music, such as the unexpectedly light-hearted closes to the D minor Piano Concerto (K 466) and the G minor String Quintet (K 516). According to Burnham, passages such as these convey ‘knowing innocence’ and signal that the ‘surplus energy of childhood’ can be revived even in the midst of loss and hardship (pp. 164–5).

During the book’s epilogue, Burnham states that perceptions of Mozart’s music as perfect, intimate and transcendent stem from the fact that it bridges two worldviews: the equilibrium prized by the Enlightenment and the ‘Romantic notion of music as a mystically potent, invisible force’ (p. 165). The composer’s music implies a self-awareness and ‘mobility of consciousness’ not mired in modern interiority and cynicism (p. 167). Instead it ‘hover[s] between innocence and experience’ and ‘teaches us that innocence can be a continually available rejuvenation of spirit rather than an all-or-nothing quality’ (pp. 165–6). That it offers the possibility of re-embracing innocence, Burnham argues, is yet another reason for the association of Mozart’s music with trust, wonder and joy.

This is not a book that examines counterarguments or goes into detailed discourses about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century definitions of beauty and ideas of self. It is not without historical grounding, however. Burnham does draw sparingly on earlier sources including Hogarth’s definition of beauty, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s famous descriptions of Mozart’s music, and Schiller’s ideas of grace.

The relation of Mozart’s music to changing listening practices and concepts of attention could be addressed more fully perhaps, particularly since Burnham’s study focuses on the effects the composer’s music has on listeners. As Matthew Riley and John Irving have demonstrated, musical culture increasingly valued attentive listening.Footnote ¹ Moreover, eighteenth-century reviews of composer’s music support one of Burnham’s main points: the unsurpassed beauty of Mozart’s music invites us to listen to it again and again. A 1789 review of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, for example, states that, ‘The music of this opera is so individual and varied that … it produces new fascination with each repeated hearing’.Footnote ² F.X. Niemetschek, writing in 1798, asks ‘Do we not enjoy listening to [Mozart’s] piano concertos, sonatas, and songs as much the 30th as the first time? … The true beauty of [Mozart’s] music is best appreciated when it has been heard several times’.Footnote ³

But this is a minor point. In the volume’s introduction, Burnham states that he seeks not to ‘demystify’ Mozart’s music, but to invite readers ‘into a kind of knowing enchantment’ (p. 5). And enchant us he does. Many of the qualities associated with Mozart’s music – grace, joy, unerring mastery – are manifest in Burnham’s writing. This is a book to savour and, like its subject, to revisit again and again.