Orfeo

by Richard Powers

Peter Els wants only one thing before he dies: to break free of time and hear the future.

By thirteen, Peter Els is out of sync with the whole eight-cylinder, aerodynamic zeal of America. He no longer cares whom his tastes embarrass. He needs nothing but his math and his Mozart, the maps back to that distant planet.

That was the curse of literacy: Once you started writing music down, the game was half over. Notation touched off a rush to uncover every trick hiding out in the rules of harmony.

He’d never engaged a lawyer for anything, not even his divorce. Calling one now felt criminal.

The composers Els returned to at seventy—Pérotin, Bach, Mahler, Berg, Bartók, Messiaen, Shostakovich, Britten—were the ones that Clara taught him to love at nineteen.

He heard himself talk, weirdly calm despite the morning, like one of those cool criminals who duck into matinees five minutes after the murder, drawn in by the promise of air-conditioning and popcorn. The lede of his arrest would write itself: terrorist caught while giving lifelong learning class on dead music to dying people.