He fell in love with a lady violinist.
It was absurd the lengths he went to to win her affection.
He gave up his job in the Civil Service.
He followed her from concert hall to concert hall,
bought every available biography of Beethoven,
learnt German fluently,
brooded over the exact nature of inhuman suffering,
but all to no avail.
Day and night she sat in her attic room,
she sat playing day and night,
oblivious of him,
and of even the sparrows that perched on her skylight mistaking her music for food.
To impress her, he began to study music in earnest.
Soon he was dismissing Vivaldi and praising Wagner.
He wrote concertos in his spare time,
wrote operas about doomed astronauts and about monsters who,
when kissed,
became even more furious and ugly.
He wrote eight symphonies taking care to leave several unfinished,
And he found no time to return to that attic room.
In fact, he grew old and utterly famous.
And when asked to what he owed
his burning genius,
he shrugged and said little,
but his mind gaped back until he saw before him
the image of a tiny room,
and perched on the skylight the timid
skeletons of sparrows still listened on.