an eight-year-old who heard Schumann’s Scenes of Childhood in the year it was published could, at seventy-five, have attended the premiere of Mahler’s Songs on the Death of Children. From the spring of Romanticism to Modernist winter in one life. 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. Ten short centuries had burned through all available innovations, each more fleeting than the last.
