Writing is a solitary activity. One person, alone with pen, paper, and thoughts, and relying, finally, on one's variable but persisting self as the arbiter of what ideas will stay, what will be discarded. But it would be misguided and ungracious to overlook how writing is, at the same time, a gregarious activity. There is always a reader, and not just imagined or implied, but real. The two I owe the greatest debt to are Nina Penner and Stefano Mengozzi. They not only read several drafts of the manuscript but spent pleasant hours discussing, agreeing with, and arguing against its ideas. When I first tried out a version of this essay at a Mozart colloquium, it was much briefer, and I was not sure what to do with it. Simon Keefe suggested that I expand it, and for that encouragement, as well as much else, I am grateful. It was gratifying to work with Ralph Locke, Julia Cook, and Sonia Kane at the University of Rochester Press. They lined up two very helpful referees, the more skeptical one no less than the one who summarized what I was trying to do better than I could, and the press's own suggestions helped to improve this book at every level, from overall organization to minutiae of individual arguments. Of course the press had to think about marketing, but I always felt that belief in the project drove the marketing, and not the other way around. Chris Kayler set the musical examples, Craig Darling assisted with copyediting, and Marilyn Bliss created the index. I knew that my friend Julia Marvin had many gifts, but I was not aware of how keen her eye was for the design of a book jacket. The cover you have before you owes much to her skill. I also want to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for material assistance and David Myska for that precious resource of research time.

There is also another kind of person to acknowledge, those whom I know solely through their writings. Karl Böttiger reports in his “Literarische Zustände” how, “when Herder was leaving Königsberg, Kant spoke with the then nineteen-year-old youth and admonished him not to brood over so many books but instead to follow his own example.