Our acquaintance with musical developments in the closing decades of the Age of Enlightenment has come about only gradually and is still far from complete. Haydn and Mozart are among our best known composers, and Haydn was known internationally in his own time. But in spite of the attraction to scholar and layman alike of this great period in musical history a definitive assessment has, so far, not been achieved. This is not true of German literature, which has elicited excellent monographs on the corresponding decades of the eighteenth century. Among these H. A. Korff's Der Geist der Goethezeit makes a conspicuous contribution by stressing the importance of Rousseau and Kant for the work of Herder and Goethe. He would be a churlish musician who would deny the relevance of Goethe's poetics and aesthetics for music, the art which is so peculiarly tied to its own technique. For this reason, Korff's searching quest for the criteria of ‘classicism’, and his attempt to define the term as a uniquely balanced blend of eighteenth-century ‘enlightenment’ and nineteenth-century ‘romanticism’ deserve to be applied to music in extenso.

Of the general histories of music written since the first World War, two deal with the period of the Enlightenment. Ernst Bücken's Die Musik des Rokokos und der Klassik (Potsdam, 1931) is the relevant volume in the series known as Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft, edited by the same author. Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, edited by Guido Adler (2nd ed., 2 vols., 1930) contains several chapters on the eighteenth century, notably Adler's ‘Die Wiener klassische Schule’, Robert Haas’ ‘Die Oper im 18.