Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics. By Stephen Rumph.

TL;DRAbstract

Stephen Rumph’s important new book is stimulated by a desire to revise and reformulate semiotic discourse on eighteenth-century music. Discussion of musical topics in the Classical era, originating in Leonard Ratner’s pioneering post-war work, has been developed over the last three decades by scholars such as Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Kofi Agawu, Elaine Sisman, Raymond Monelle, David Lidov, and Robert Hatten. But Rumph’s approach to semiotics is broader and deeper than those of his twentieth- and early twenty-first-century predecessors, firmly rooted in eighteenth-century intellectual history pertaining above all to Enlightenment sign theory. Whether read primarily as a book about Mozart, or about convergences between eighteenth-century theory and Mozart’s music, or about meaning in music, Rumph has produced a first-rate work of scholarship. The introduction, six chapters, and epilogue are impressive both in breadth of musical coverage and in sophistication of historical and analytical m

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