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Uneven, unfocused, and in the end unsatisfying work of music popular-history by a Curtis prof. Does a decent enough job of conjuring the contexts of Romanticism and reactionary post-Napoleonic Europe. But the musical insights are pitifully meager and basic. Not a single measure of music is reproduced -- Sachs's claim not to be a musicologist is amply borne out - and he repeatedly falls back on subjective description and the old Victorian cliches about the"transcendence" of Beethoven's music. While leaving out so much that is essential, Sacks often loses the plot, and the narrative is easily and often sidetracked into unprofitable detours: unnecessary footnotes about Faust on 54 and Anatole France on 102, a page-long quotation from a poem by Coleridge about British tourism [!!!], substantial asides on the Erie and Welland canals -- plus overlong sections on Byron and Pushkin that eat up no less than 10% of the book.

The book is so padded with non sequiturs and irrelevancies that it reminded me of an undergraduate final exam blue book, in which a student has dumped everything he can possibly think of tangentially related to the subject to disguise all the essentials that are missing.

Sachs also has an annoying habit of making ex cathedra pronouncements, e.g. the pretty unmistakable allusions to the Ninth Symphony in Schubert's own Ninth he dismisses as "coincidental" and claims of influence "far-fetched" (171), without bothering to offer any evidence for such an outlier conclusion -- although a footnote makes it seem this is an excuse to avoid tracing musical influences of the Ninth on later compositions.

In short, too many important avenues left unexplored, too much of the extraneous left in, with section headings that read like scribbled notes toward an emerging thesis ("Relief + regret + repression = Romanticism?") underscoring the book's half-bakedness.