Taruskin wishes to do justice to the entire tradition, which does not mean doing justice to all its members. A tradition is understood as the common law is understood -through the precedents or "leading cases" that shape and control the argument. Hence Taruskin concentrates on major stylistic innovations, on the rise and fall of genres, on the local styles, schools and musical cultures, and on the times and places where music influenced and was influenced by the social and political movements that made the modern world.
He devotes much space to the Enlightenment, and to nationalism as a pervasive reaction to it. He explores the social and intellectual transition that made music into an emblem of the inner life. And he argues, in one of the most challenging of his chapters, that Beethoven was remodelled after his death in mythic terms, by way of revising the place accorded to the artist in Western culture. He gives weight to composers regarded, in the standard histories, as marginal or minor -Johann Schein, Domenico Ferrabosco, Carl Lœwe, M. A.
Balakirev, Aleksandr Dargomizhsky -and passes over some of the greatest composers in the canon, including Marc-Antoine Charpentier and Vincenzo Bellini, with barely a mention.
Bruckner gets short shrift, and the two Couperins appear only en passant, during a discussion of the keyboard works of J. S. Bach. The reason for this (apart from the fact that you cannot say everything about everything) is that Taruskin is not concerned to give an encyclopedic chronology but an illustrative history. Every chapter hangs on a single and persuasive argumentative thread, which concerns the artistic means and aesthetic goals of a time and a place. Lœwe is there, for example, because Taruskin wishes to show the Lied in its full cultural context, as a product of the Goethezeit, and of the Romantic attempt to carry the fairy tale forest into the bourgeois drawing room, there to murmur in the piano strings.
Minor Lieder composers are important for Taruskin because he sees them as part of a collective enterprise, in which, as he puts it, the Romantic I attempts to bond with the Romantic We. He goes on to connect this Romantic We with nationalist aspirations, distinguishing the civic patriotism of the amiable Mendelssohn from the darker and more Herderian nationalisms that were eventually to sweep all civility away. All this is suggestively argued, and argued through the music.
Taruskin writes with ease and assurance, convincing the reader that he is at home in every period, equipped with all the expertise and intimate familiarity that make him a reliable guide both to the form and the content of the musical works. Sometimes he devotes pages to a single work or corpus: for example, there is a sustained analysis of Bach's French Suites, and another, crammed with historical, musical and critical insights, of the First Symphony of Brahms. But Taruskin does not give an exhaustive catalogue of works or even attempt an enumeration of the most important masterpieces. His technique is to use the music to illustrate some larger aesthetic or historical idea -in the case of Brahms, for instance, the idea of the newly emerging "classical repertoire" as an emotional and cultural constraint on musical creativity.
Often he will confine his discussion to a miniature or a fragment, the better to understand the style and outlook through which a composer established his identity as a "leading case". Thus the author presents the historical importance of Chopin in an exemplary analysis of the first Ballade, bringing home the truth (obvious in retrospect) that Chopin transformed the technique of musical development, by opening new harmonic and melodic paths that preserve the memory of an original motif. This discussion is so clearly focused and illuminating that you can (or I can) forgive Taruskin for coupling Chopin with Louis Gottschalk as equally significant "exotics". When discussing Schubert, Taruskin is far more interested in the composer's use of third relations in place of the circle of fifths, than in any individual masterpiece such as the Ninth Symphony or the String Quintet. This is because he believes that the underlying change in the musical syntax, and the prominence accorded to the German sixth and the keys of the mediant and submediant, show a new relation between music and the psyche, and a new kind of soulfulness finding its musical vindication. Through the circle of fifths, Western music built objective structures that stand firm as rocks, like the symphonies of Haydn. Through the circle of thirds, it made its journey inwards, to become a self-communing of the lonely soul.
Again, when discussing Wagner's Ring cycle, Taruskin focuses on one passage the Prelude to Gotterdammerung, in which the three Norns ponder the fate of the world, as they pass to each other the rope on which the scheme of things is woven.
