Surveying the world of Modernist art from Pissarro to Cézanne to Pollock, the art historian T. J. Clark identifies an axis around which these otherwise heterogeneous works turn: “the impossibility of transcendence.” That insight was not easy to come by in light of a basic problem of intelligibility posed by the era's art. “The modernist past,” Clark eulogizes, “is a ruin, the logic of whose architecture we do not remotely grasp” (2).

However that condition may be for the artistic products of Modernism, its attitude toward transcendence remains in very good repair in present-day music criticism. Transcendence as a concept we have collectively moved beyond, or ought to have—and if we have not, then we have let ourselves fall back to history's arrière-garde —that confidence in having now explained the meaning and therefore neutralized the authority of transcendence permeates recent thinking about Mozart's creative achievement. It is hardly confined there, and yet the stakes are particularly high with him. If any single composer's music seems to have defied the gravitational forces of time and place or the earthly exigencies of labor, it would be Mozart’s. As Burnham notes, it is hard to imagine the language of divinity and perfection being routinely applied to any other composer, with the exception of Bach. Were Mozart to fall from that position, then everyone else would necessarily follow.

A historian of a certain positivist bent might demur. “We are not imposing a cultural value on Mozart other than what sober, empirical scholarship calls for,” the response might run. “Any undelusional mind can see that Romantic idolatry of Mozart causes hyperventilation and generates error; we are simply easing the former condition so as to eliminate the latter.” A certain kind of social critic might commend this newly gained insight about Mozart as the fruit of a long, patient labor of disenchanting the world. Here, as well, the sense of a durable achievement prevails. The modernist Mozart is not just Mozart for our time; he is one we can project back onto his day (and earlier) to achieve greater clarity about what was. From this perspective, no conflict holds between modernism and humanism.