Editor's note: Robin Freeman, who was a frequent contributor to Tempo in the 1990s, both in his own name and under his favoured alias of ‘Tristram Pugin’ (signifying Shandeian Gothick, perhaps), died of leukemia after long illness in November 2004. About a year before he had e-mailed the present essay to the Editor of Tempo, apparently more for interest than as a formal submission. Despite the characteristic difficulties of the text, some of which have been modified in the editing process, and its equally characteristic heedlessness of reputations (few other writers would have had the chutzpah to dismiss Charles Rosen's The Classical Style as ‘underinformed and overambitious’!), it has seemed well worth publishing here.