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...