The opening of the two new railroads, one of which is to Orleans [sic], the other to Rouen, is causing a startling electric sensation which every one experiences, unless he stands apart upon his insulated glass stool. The whole population of Paris forms at this instant a chain in which one communicates to another the shock. … What marvellous changes must now enter into our methods of perception and action. Even the elementary ideas of space and time are tottering; for by the railway space is annihilated, and only time remains. Oh, that we had money enough to kill the latter properly!¹

Somehow, the enormity and intractability of a subject such as time seem not to have deterred countless authors ancient or recent, but rather to constitute a stimulus especially to those invested in puzzling philosophical problems and knotty conundrums. Benedict Taylor is one whose interest in time has remained thus undeterred for a while now, and The Melody of Time: Music and Temporality in the Romantic Era represents an extension of the field of his earlier endeavors to bring questions of the nature of time to bear on the analysis and interpretation of music, “the most quintessentially temporal of the arts” (p. 7). This book shares some features of Taylor's previous monograph Mendelssohn, Time and Memory: The Romantic Conception of Cyclic Form (Cambridge University Press, …