For example, what about the third movement, that mad Scherzo, and the five tiny interludes of sweet quiet scattered through its plunging fury? They were not alike. Related, perhaps, but each one demanded a new climate of heart and mind--tenderness, regret, simple relaxation. Flowers on a flood--no. Warm window-lights in a storm--no. The innocence of an unknowing child in a bombed city--no, not really. Something of all those, but much more, too. What of the second movement, the Largo, where, in a way, the pattern was reversed, the midnight introspection interrupted by moments of anger, or longing, or despair like that of an angel beating his wings against a prison of glass? It was, throughout, a work in which something of Carr's life and Carr's temperament had to come into you, whether you dared welcome it or not; otherwise, your playing was no more than a bumbling reproduction of notes on a page. Carr's life was not for the contemplation of the timid. * * * * * The details were superficially well known. The biographies themselves were like musical notation, meaningless without interpretation and insight. Carr had been a drunken roarer, a young devil-god with such a consuming hunger for life that he had choked to death on it. His friends hated him for the way he drained their lives, loving them to distraction and always loving his work a little more. His enemies must have had times of helplessly adoring him, if only because of an impossible transparent honesty that made him more and less than human. A rugged Australian, not tall but built like a hero, a face all forehead and jaw and glowing hyperthyroid eyes. He wept only when he was angry, the biographers said. In one minute of talk, they said, he might shift from gutter obscenity to some extreme of altruistic tenderness, and from that to a philosophical comment of the coldest intelligence. He passed his childhood on a sheep farm, ran away to sea on a freighter at thirteen, studied like a slave in London with a single-minded desperation, even through the horrors of the Pandemic of 1972. He was married twice and twice divorced. He killed a man in an imbecile quarrel on the New Orleans docks, and wrote his First Symphony while he was in jail for that. And he died of stab wounds in a Cairo jail. It all had relevancy. Relevant or not, if the sonata was in your mind, so was the life. You had to remember also that Andrew Carr was the last of civilization's great composers. No one in the 21st century approached him--they ignored his explorations and carved cherry-stones. He belonged to no school, unless you wanted to imagine a school of music beginning with Bach, taking in perhaps a dozen along the way, and ending with Carr himself. His work was a summary and, in the light of the year 2070, a completion.