Critics had long dismissed the composer's later symphonies as wandering and formless, the work of a mind that had lost its discipline. The biographer, however, asks readers to consider the letters from those years, in which the composer described deliberately loosening the old rules to chase a freer kind of expression. What sounded like aimlessness, she argues, was in fact a chosen path, pursued with as much care as his tightly structured early pieces. The fault, in her view, lay not in the music but in listeners who measured it against a standard the composer had knowingly set aside.