Difficult but interesting

While I have the general feeling that the author's commentary is well informed, this is a hard book to appraise if you're not familiar enough with Mozart's work to recognize pieces by name, plus a few of his contemporaries like Haydn. My lack of familiarity makes the author's more speculative and far-fetching analysis stand out sorely, as I have no idea if such opinions are glaringly obvious from the music itself - for those who have the right ear - or if it's just a strong take the author felt like sharing.

The writer's research was clearly thorough, given mentions of letter correspondence and historical context descriptions are plentiful, but these materials aren't explicitly linked to general conclusions by the author. It's a bit disappointing because rather than the book telling me what to think based on the author's research, I'd prefer it showed me why each conclusion makes sense based on specific historical evidence.

On writing style, I found a bit tiresome the overuse of antithesis throughout. I get that ambiguity, paradoxes, contradictions and all sorts of juxtaposition-based figures of speech play a major role defining a complex musical piece, just like it does for literature, because everything and everyone carries conflicting worlds inside which contributes to expressiveness and semantic depth. But what that starts out feeling thoughtful quickly becomes a cookie-cutter formula for crafting critique - turbulent yet soothing; grandiose yet humbling; revolutionary yet familiar; competitive yet fraternal; etc. Again, show me why the piece contains multitudes instead of just telling me. In all fairness, the author sometimes tries to do so, speaking about specific movements and instrument interactions, but without knowing the piece by heart this isn't very effective.

Having consumed the text via audiobook, I lament the wasted opportunity of assembling a superb edition that could have contained a few musical excerpts of each work as they get commented. I'd bet that even for the most knowledgeable readers who heard each piece thousands of time, listening to some scores here and there would have enriched the experience.