Hours after Franz Schubert and Johann Michael Vogel perform a commissioned song for a notorious countess, she ends up dead, and the two musicians become the prime suspects.

Franz Schubert is convinced by his friend and musical partner, Johann Michael Vogl, to set aside preparations for his new opera Alfonso Und Estrella to accept a commission from the notorious Countess Eugénie von Neulinger. Schubert agrees to set an anonymous poem to music and present it with Vogl at one of the countess's famous soirées. Within hours of the performance, Countess Eugénie, the secret author of the poem, is murdered. Both Schubert and Vogl, an old paramour of Eugénie, become suspects.

Authorities assigned to the case care more about providing a quick, politically expedient solution to the crime than catching the right criminal, and begin to delve into Schubert's and Vogl's private lives. When one of the detectives assigned to follow Schubert also ends up dead, Vogl sees a noose tightening around his composer friend. Convinced that the commissioned song must be the key, Vogl acts desperately but decisively to stop the murderer as well as to preserve the source of much immortal music.