In 1958 the Ukrainian-born Russian poet Anna Akhmatova wrote a poem with the simple title “Music.” It bears the dedication “To Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich, in whose epoch I live on earth.” The poem begins: “Something miraculous burns in music;/as you watch, its edges crystallize./Only music speaks to me/when others turn away their eyes.” Music, we are told, remains faithful even though all others have gone: “When fearful friends abandoned me/music stayed, even at my grave,/and sang like earth’s first shower of rain/or flowers suddenly everywhere alive.” That such an exquisite artist in words could write a hymn of praise to the power of a sister muse raises a host of questions. How does music transcribe suffering, and how can it console? Why does it arouse feelings in us, and can those feelings be put into words? Is music even a language? If so, how does it convey its meaning?

For those who write about music these are not idle questions. Not only critics but composers, too, have often said that music is a self-referential art with its own syntax and meanings that resist translation, since music, they claim, is “absolute” and utterly beyond representation. As the musicologist Carl Dahlhaus once explained, the idea of absolute music has a long and vexed history that spanned the nineteenth century and reached its apogee in the great works of symphonic and chamber music by the likes of Beethoven and Brahms, composers whom Europe’s haute bourgeoisie venerated as saints of a secular religion. In the twentieth century, however, this once-noble idea began to curdle: the horrors of modern war and genocide seemed to condemn the notion of world-transcendent art. As a matter of moral necessity, music, Akhmatova’s “faithful friend,” might have to remain at the graveside while humanity mourned.