More than two hundred years ago, a theater journal from Hamburg reviewed a performance of The Marriage of Figaro. Its author was probably Bernhard Anselm Weber, a composer and music director. The evening's entertainment left a deep impression on Mozart's fellow musician:

To Weber, Figaro looked like an animated thing. It awakened human passion; it extended and enriched life.

More than a decade ago, Figaro elicited a different kind of response from a journal, including to its famed penultimate scene, where the Count and Countess reconcile and in that ritual restore and renew a wider community:

Now, Figaro looks like an inert thing. The concluding “very beautiful noise” concedes a surface appeal, but in the manner of monumental alabaster— immobile and impenetrable to human interest. Where there is art, there is no life.

Of the many questions crowding in for attention, the main one this essay pursues is: What are the terms of this more modern argument about Mozart's music? Presupposed in that question is the availability of other vocabularies for describing art, in which case another question immediately intrudes: For whom are these values true? That question, of the durability and reach of what I call a modernist Mozart poetics, is much more difficult to answer. Although this essay attends to modernism's imprint on art criticism in the academy, its quest to resolve creative acts into simpler states extends well beyond that discipline and even that venue.