This is a tale of light and shadow, what we hear and the silence that follows. Remember this as we set out across sea and high roads, as talk turns to gentlemen and valets, grave robbers and tormented souls. This is a story about music and what it does to those who make it, whom it enslaves . . . yes, slavery of all kinds enters into the mix, although the skin of our protagonist does not play so great a role in his advancement and subsequent fade from grace as might be imagined. Or does it? Rather, let us say that the racial divide has not yet been invented; you lived, you died, things happened between the two.

But you are here for the story. The story someone penned in thirst and anger on an uncharted desert isle, then stuffed into a bottle that now floats, a glassine porpoise, swell upon swell, too small for anyone to find . . . until the paper inside finally crisps, tanned beyond recognition by the sun that is its constant lover . . . . So it is a lost story but we will be imagining it, anyway We’ll leave out the boring parts There’ll be marching bands, wardrobe changes and, of course, Love—melting hearts, sweaty meringues, Flowers of the Realm and the occasional heave-to in the shrubbery. Political cartoons. Honorable, quiet fools. [End Page 671]

The major players: Father and son, son and father. Two composers, a violinist between them. An African Prince in Turkish robes; a Prince of Wales turned Regent turned King; an Assistant Keeper of the Wardrobe to the Queen. (Always the wait-staff, ever vigilant, eye- and ear-y.) A music student turned copyist, a performer turned entrepreneur, a faux emperor, a famed chef, a fiddling beggar; plus assorted fops and dabblers, countesses and dwarves, all with their freakish bundles of accouterments: turbans and reticules, wigs and vinaigrettes; brooches painted in the shape of the lover’s eye.

Enter two prodigies (of an age but not a color), an absent mother and all-too-present father, a fattening son and his maddening sire, a small man and his indigestion, a fat man and his gout, rabble and revolutionaries, guillotines cranking up in time with the organ grinders, just your average gulp of hope and gobble of terror—then picture a river pouring itself through a city, picking up garbage and gulls, doused in barge-oil, speckled with swans, lapping and sloshing and pooling . . . that’s how we’ll be traveling—and the rest, as they say, is background music. (Ah, but what heavenly music that was . . . ) [End Page 672]

Snow’s a gentle pillager: It sucks where we have no more...