Hearing the symphonies and concertos of Haydn and Mozart with an ear tuned to operatic style, as their earliest listeners did, this book shows that this familiar music is built on a set of mimetic associations drawn from conventional modes of depicting character and emotion in opera buffa.
"Consistently accessible, quick-witted and amusing . . . One must be grateful to Smart and Taruskin for asserting the virtues of scholarly community by taking up Wendy Allanbrook’s unfinished opus and delivering it to the world."
