Maximilian von Eichen

He walked away from his family's banking empire at twenty-four to chase the podium, and spent thirty-six years proving himself on every major stage in Europe. His father called music a pastime for idle hands; Maximilian conducted Mahler in Milan and never looked back. At sixty he leads the Viennese orchestra he worshipped as a boy, exacting and untouchable, sleeping four hours a night in the apartment overlooking the Ringstrasse. No one has been inside his rehearsal room uninvited in a decade. He wants to be known beyond the baton, but fears that without it he is only an old man with nothing left to offer.