Like many 18th and 19th century composers, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart spent a large part of his life on the road. During this time, he impulsively poured his unexpurgated thoughts into copious letters home. These are of crucial biographical importance, but their translation is problematic. Mozart had no formal education and wrote in a mixture of German, French and Italian. His grammar and spelling were unruly and his literary efforts idiosyncratic in the highest degree. Although the words themselves are easily decoded with the help of bilingual dictionaries, the real problem lies in the tone and, as Robert Spaethling observes, previous translators have ducked this. He points to the inappropriateness of reading the letters in impeccable grammar, and aims rather to preserve the natural flow and flavour of Mozart's origi­nal style.

Spaethling clearly loves words, and linguistic nuance, as much as Mozart did himself. And when the linguistic games are at their most complex, he democratically prints the original alongside the translation so that we can quarrel and do better. The beauty of this work is that now we can see how – casually and seemingly without trying – Mozart parodies the epistolary modes of the day. And it's possible to see a connection between this freewheeling brilliance with words and his prodigious musical abilities.

The Beta Band's forte, aside from occasionally making remarkable music, lies in not liking things. At least so you might think from reading interviews with them, for given half a chance the quartet tends to betray an almost pathological desire to complain: about the rubbish state of pop music today, for instance, or the groups they reckon have ripped them off, or the perfidious behaviour of their record company.

This yen for negation reached its logical conclusion in 1999 when they denounced their own debut album as a meretricious piece of work, the worst that would be released all year. Why? The record company didn't give them enough money, they claimed. Nonsense, came the retort, it was the group's demands that were too extravagant – such as wanting to make a double LP with each of the four sides recorded in a different continent.

Whatever the truth of the matter, the result was that the band punctured much of the excitement they had generated earlier in their career. At their best, they're a quixotically imaginative pop group – with an ability to combine styles creatively – but when it doesn't gel, as on that first album, you get self-indulgence and a frustrating sense of wasted promise.