Music's Power

Interestingly, Galloway’s titular character, the cellist himself, is only given one chapter in which his perspective is revealed. Before the bread line in Sarajevo is bombed, the cellist is as depressed by the war as everyone else is—he sometimes plays an adagio to bring himself hope, but with each passing day, hope seems more and more far off. Indeed, “there are only a certain number of Adagios left in him, and he will not recklessly spend this precious currency” (xvi). The cellist’s music, while his hometown is under siege, is fuel for his own hope.

However, when the bread line was bombed and twenty-two people died as a result, the cellist’s idea of music and who it is for changes entirely. He remembers the days before the way, when he was the principal cellist of the Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra, “when he...