Volume I of Balthasar’s Early Writings contains his first published book, The Development of the Musical Idea. Attempt at a Synthesis of Music(1925), along with a short text written from 1955: In Praise of Mozart. The former work, The Development of the Musical Idea, is divided into two parts. Part one, devoted to the three constituents of music: rhythm, melody, and harmony, presents the whole of music theory in germ. In the second part, Balthasar sketches a philosophy of music under in terms of “structure,” “limits,” and “values.” In his conclusion, he writes of music as “that form that brings us closest to the spirit, the thinnest of the veils separating us from it. Yet it shares the tragic lot of all art: It cannot be more than a yearning and, therefore, must remain something preliminary. It is a boundary-point of the human, and it is at this boundary that the divine begins.”