[1] A strange sense of melancholia kept coming over me as I was reading Lee Rothfarb’s absorbing study of August Halm. Perhaps it had something to do with the repeated vexations of Halm’s life, such as his perpetual frustration in finding stable and satisfying employment. Maybe it was that he never seemed to have settled the question of his vocation: was he a music educator or a theologian? A theorist or a critic? A composer or a conductor? He made efforts in all those areas, yet each seemed only a piece of some greater ambition, some greater project that never quite materialized in his life. Then again, there was the obvious discontent he felt—and expressed in his writings—about the sorry state of musical culture as he scanned the landscape of Europe in the first decades of the 20th century. Like Schenker, with whom he enjoyed an avid correspondence, his “theory,” if we may call it that, was conservative in its pedigree yet almost utopic in its aspiration. Of course, Halm never attained the fame of Schenker (and it is not hard to detect an obvious intimidation in the tone of many of his letters to his Viennese counterpart). One is not surprised to learn that at the end of his life he lamented that no one would be reading his writings in another twenty years (173).