Brigid Brophy's first novel, "Hackenfeller's Ape," published in the United States in 1954, was a high-spirited comedy constructed on three themes—love (or sex), death, and Mozart. She has not given up on them, as her two most recent books—"Mozart the Dramatist" …, and two short novels in one volume, "The Snow Ball" and "The Finishing Touch" …—show. Miss Brophy's style is brilliant; it is entertaining, direct, lucid, and active; it half anticipates its surprising events and ideas. Her themes, on the other hand, have developed into eccentricities. She is a Freudian as one might be a Baconian; she has the answers to questions no one cares about.

You can waste your time pondering Mozart's problems with his father, Leopold (who is surely history's most appalling stage mother), unless you remember that Mozart bequeathed us his work—pure pleasure—and not his problems. Miss Brophy, alas, cannot enter into this joyful inheritance with thanksgiving. In "Mozart the Dramatist," she applies her own notions of psychoanalysis to the eighteenth century, to the Enlightenment, to Mozart, and to his librettos. She is looking for difficulties, and she solves the ones she finds by overworking that intellectually dangerous word "really"—"the scandalous transgression of class barriers which is really a question of incest." "Really" allows her to make a unity out of what is in fact multiplicity, to achieve coherence at the price of sense. "The Snow Ball," which could have been a touching story about love offered and rejected, is weakened by its unconvincing psychoanalytic assessments of some personages in Mozart's "Don Giovanni" and by touches of character that seem to come from textbooks. About "The Finishing Touch," the less said the better. It is intended as a naughty joke about Lesbian loves at a girls' school, but it doesn't come off. As a matter of fact, though all three of these Brophy works have enchantingly funny surfaces, their obsession makes them at bottom humorless. (pp. 75-6)

What is wonderful Mozart doing in Miss Brophy's gallery of gummy abstractions? Well, Miss Brophy thinks he is not only the greatest opera composer of the eighteenth century (and ever after) but the best expositor, in his operas, of that century's psychosexual problems. These, she believes, matter to us; I am not so certain. I doubt that we profit from Miss Brophy's suggestions about Mozart's operas: say, that Cherubino, the love-happy adolescent page in "Figaro," is really a phallus. Our sexuality, like our faces, goes wherever we go, but when we go to the opera, we are after an essentially musical experience. Mozart provides the score, and we can talk to our analysts some other time. Miss Brophy praises Mozart as a psychologist; she might as well praise Joan of Arc for her cooking.

Good sense (as well as charm) is mixed in with her nonsense. She argues well that psychology cannot destroy art by explaining it away, and wouldn't if it could. She does not realize, though, that the psychology of art is not art, or even criticism, but psychology. As a critic, in "Mozart the Dramatist," she bases her judgment of artistic value almost entirely on how well a work of art handles the psychological ideas she's interested in. As an artist, in "The Snow Ball," she reverses her critical process and builds her characters around these ideas, which protrude distractingly. (p. 76)