The weight of society -- Freedom and art -- Culture on the market -- The future of music -- The canon -- Dramatic and tonal logic in Mozart's operas -- Mozart's entry into the twentieth century -- The triumph of Mozart -- Drama and figured bass in Mozart's concertos -- Mozart and posterity -- Structural dissonance and the classical sonata -- Tradition without convention -- Felix Mendelssohn at 200 : prodigy without peer -- Happy birthday, Elliott Carter! -- Frédéric Chopin, reactionary and revolutionary -- Robert Schumann, a vision of the future -- Long perspectives -- The New Grove's dictionary returns -- Western music : the view from California -- Theodore Adorno : criticism as cultural nostalgia -- Resuscitating opera : Alessandro Scarlatti -- Operatic paradoxes : the ridiculous and sublime -- Lost chords and the golden age of pianism -- Montaigne : philosophy as process -- La Fontaine : the ethical power of style -- The anatomy lesson : melancholy and the invention of boredom -- Mallarmé and the transfiguration of poetry -- Hoffmansthal and radical modernism -- The private obsessions of Wystan Auden -- Old wisdom and newfangled theory : two one-way streets to disaster.