The fascination of music against the wounds of time. The starting point of this book is a discovery of the romantic imagination: music creates a time of its own that comes to experience itself with such intensity that it can substitute real time for its transfiguration. The arrest of the wheel of time and its deafening noise, in the history of the naked monk (Wackenroder), becomes a paradigm of the romantic artistic experience, substitute of the religion. Thus, the book reviews the way the idea is systematized and developed, among others, by Schopenhauer, Wagner, Adorno and Levi-Strauss. The second part analyzes how certain contemporary musics have tackled the time, to face their enigmas through the sound. The main examples are Luciano Berio's Symphony and Luigi Nono's string quartet, but also a literary model, poetry that strictly imitates music in order to talk about time beyond the limits of language: Four quartets of TS Eliot .