SOURCE: "Opera Misconstrued," in The Hudson Review, Vol. 18, no. 3, Summer, 1965, pp. 309-12.

Below, Kerman faults Mozart the Dramatist for ignoring Mozart's music and emphasizing a Freudian approach to the musician's operas.

I do not think that Miss Brophy knows quite what she is up to in [Mozart the Dramatist]. She has some striking and original ideas about the way Mozart's operas reflect his and his century's psychosexuality, but she is constantly shifting ground as to whether this information should be treated as criticism, biography, or sociology. She is as seduced as a sophomore by Kulturgeschichte—in her case, by a feminist Freudian Kulturgeschichte—but her extended references to Pope, Tiepolo, Jane Austen, Voltaire, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Paul et Virginie, Thomas Love Peacock, Mozart, etc., get hopelessly side-tracked and tangled up. In general she makes herself hard to follow. Some chapters are two pages long, some nearly forty; The...