The Power of the Moment

The Power of the Moment is a collection of critical essays on some of the most familiar works from the musical canon. Not unlike literary essays by poets or novelists, it pointedly avoids abstract constructs in order to elucidate what it is that we actually experience in the course of a performance. On several occasions alternate versions of a passage are compared to the original to provide a graphic illustration of the composer's intentions. Two chapters are devoted to Beethoven. The first move