Wolfgang was fourteen when he heard Allegri’s Miserere at the Wednesday service of Holy Week in Rome. On April 14, 1770, his father wrote home that the boy had copied out the whole piece from memory.

That was as close to a recording studio as Mozart ever got. To keep a piece of music in his world, you memorized it or you wrote it down.

Dan Brown brings him back in his novel The Secret of Secrets. Over lunch in Manhattan, the scientist Katherine Solomon points at a small wireless speaker playing classical music and asks what Mozart would make of it. He’d assume an orchestra was hiding behind the wall, she says, or a tiny one sat inside the box. The radio waves filling the room would never cross his mind. Edison introduced his phonograph in 1877, eighty-six years after Mozart died.