Marked from birth and abandoned, a brilliant and oddly gifted boy grows up amid the intellectual and political ferment of Europe at the end of the fifteenth century.A quirk of fate makes him a prot?g? of the composer Heinrich Isaac and puts him in the august company of Lorenzo the Magnificent and the Emperor Maximilian. A first-rate mind but a second-rate musical talent frustrates his ambition for recognition; and his quest for identity begins to overpower even his pretension to mystical power. At the center of his life is music, a rich tradition and craft of musical composition and performance which is about to be superceded and lost. Yet he believes himself able to ride out the holocaust that will destroy what he cherishes along with what he despises.Unable to interpret or even understand the unimaginable future his visions show him, he stands at the dawn of our modern era, desparate and terrified, asking questions, seeking refuge, shouting his futile warnings in the face of an indifferent world.An epic that resonates with the denial and frenzy of our own time.