“A withdrawal from the grandeur of the monograph into a more lyrical world of fragments and essays, strange and productively uneven tapestries, captivating islands of colourful aperçus poetically abandoned in seas of a sometimes baffling, threadbare weave. . . . Exquisite . . . . If Cherubino’s Leap has such a wealth to offer to our historical understanding of the various ends of the long eighteenth century, it has even more to offer us in terms of the pleasures of the scholarly act itself.”
 

James R. Currie | Eighteenth-Century Music

“Cherubino’s Leap is full of revelations, as acute and probing an investigation of Enlightenment sensibility as has yet been penned.”
 

Musical Times

“No one writes about late Enlightenment music with the sensitivity and critical acuity of Kramer. In this extraordinary book, close readings that are as attentive to poetic and musical detail as they are attuned to shades of feeling movingly explore moments of deep inscrutability in C. P. E. Bach, Gluck, Beethoven, and Mozart. Kramer’s profound sympathy with the paradoxes and ironies of the culture of sensibility, and his discreetly brilliant way of writing about them, are breathtaking.”

Annette Richards, author of The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque

“In this provocative book, Kramer explores musical moments that foster intense engagement by the listener. With a virtuosic range of reference to Enlightenment thinkers, and with heart-catching analyses of words set to music, Cherubino’s Leap seeks to understand the ‘inner ear’ of several important composers by working outward from brief but powerful evocations of meaning in their works. A welcome offering from one of our most profoundly musical scholars.”

Elaine Sisman, author of Haydn and the Classical Variation

“Cherubino’s Leap is an excellent study by an outstanding musical thinker. It is a work sui generis, an elegant, refined, uncompromising exploration of critical passages in eighteenth-century masterpieces. This is engagement with music at the deepest level.”

William Drabkin, editor of Music Analysis

“No living writer on music is more qualified to point his snapshot camera obscura at moments that look initially either on the margins or so familiar that we need no further elucidation. The through-line in this provocative and wide-ranging collection of essays is that perpetual tension between the diatonic and the chromatic, and the author’s nine close readings of everything from a Klopstock ode to the mysteries of Cherubino are page-turning celebrations of layered, interwoven storytelling.”

Robert S. Winter, University of California, Los Angeles

"Cherubino’s Leap springs nimbly across decades, characters, and musical works."

Notes