THE MOMENT

There is a photograph, taken by A. Levi in a white-cyc studio in TriBeCa in September, that has become, in the six weeks since it ran, the defining image of the year in music. Luca is sitting on a black barstool. There is a miniature piano balanced on his left knee. He is thirteen, and he looks, in the photograph, exactly and only thirteen, no older, no wiser, no more or less than a boy whose sister has told him not to slouch. The photograph ran, over the same three-week window, on the cover of BILLBOARD's 21 UNDER 21 (No. 1, unanimously, for the first time in the list's fifteen-year history), on the front of TIME's annual 100 (as the youngest honoree ever to appear on the list, a distinction that required TIME to add a new paragraph to its own methodology), and on the digital cover of FORBES 30 UNDER 30: MUSIC, where the editors, unwilling to publish a boy alongside twenty-somethings twice his age without at least a footnote, added one: "Thirteen. That is not a typo."

The teen-facing rooms followed a week later. The TEEN CHOICE BREAKOUT ARTIST surfboard was handed to him by two actors he had never heard of, on a stage his mother had made him promise, in the car, he would not fidget on. The KIDS' CHOICE FAVORITE NEW ARTIST blimp was poured on him in slime the color of a bruised lime, which he took, in the moment, exactly as gracefully as a thirteen-year-old is expected to, and which he described, in the car afterward, as "the best day of my whole entire year, and also I can't hear out of one ear now."

The trophies, taken singly, are small. Taken together, they are the shape of a fall. There is no chart in music that Luca Starr is not, in October of 2016, at the top of. There is no demographic he is not, this month, the number-one answer to. He is the first classical artist to appear on the cover of a teen magazine that is not itself classical. He is the first teenager to appear, in the same week, on the cover of a classical magazine that is not itself teen. Somebody somewhere is printing his face on a lunchbox. Somebody else is asking, in a meeting, whether the lunchbox is a good idea. Nobody in either meeting is thirteen.

I spent an afternoon with him, in a Loudoun County living room whose blinds his mother had lowered against a line of cars parked on Evergreen Mill Road, and I want to be honest about what I saw. He was tired. He was polite. He had a small, fresh bandage on the inside of his left wrist that, when I asked about it, he pulled a sleeve over. He said, of the lists, that they were "nice, but also, they're everybody's lists, not mine." He said, of the noise, that it "helps if you pretend the noise is water and you're just a rock." He said, of his sister, only that "she has been worried more than she has said," and would not elaborate.

At one point he stood up, walked to the family upright, and played, from memory, four bars of a Ravel piece he had not, he said, played for anyone yet. He played them, on request, three times, twice slowly, once at tempo. Each time the four bars ended in the same unresolved chord, hanging in the room like a question no one in it had asked. Each time he let the chord die on its own, and each time he waited, at the keyboard, until it did.

"That's my favorite part," he said, on the third take, without turning around. "The part where the sound isn't there anymore, but you can still tell where it was."

The Symphony, his tour finale, sold out in eleven minutes, scheduled for late September of the following year, is, by now, the most anticipated live event in classical music. He will not, at any point, play it. This is the last article written about him in which nobody in the room yet knows that. It is worth reading in that light.