To that last question I would respond with an emphatic "no". Here and there, it is true, the strain of the endeavour tells (not least in the misprints in the musical examples). But Taruskin is giving us history of another and, to my mind, more valuable kind than that contained in Grove: the basic facts, certainly, but also an interpretation of them as a unified Gestalt, an interpretation that displays their intellectual and moral significance for us, now. This is the kind of history that only a single author can present, and which will inevitably be botched by a committee. The Oxford History of Western Music is not a work of reference, any more than was Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or Spengler's Decline of the West. It is a visionary addition to our understanding of our culture.

The reader might ask nevertheless whether Taruskin's vision has any authority for the rest of us, and from what kind of sensibility it emerges. The answer is that his is very much a modern sensibility. But it is a sensibility informed by a far-reaching moral imagination, which makes him alive to the significance of music, and able to address his reader, as Beethoven hoped to address his audience, "from the heart, to the heart". The romantic "Beethoven myth" was not, after all, the fabrication that Taruskin condemns: it was part of the attempt that he himself exemplifies, to show music as a force that reconciles us to each other and to the world in which we live. That vision of music may be vanishing from the world of popular culture, as it is dwindling, too, in the world of academic musicology.

But it is a vision that Richard Taruskin, in these volumes, triumphantly vindicates.