Music: Mastering the Wild Things

When Maurice Sendak's dark fantasy Where the Wild Things Are first appeared between covers in 1963, some adults were disturbed by its unapologetic depiction of a child's raw emotions. In the deceptively gentle pastels of the slender 338-word book lurked naked monsters from the id, great horned behemoths who "gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws" to the book's naughty young hero, Max. One alarmed reviewer wrote that Sendak's volume should not be "left about where a sensitive child might find it to pore over in the twilight." Children, with a greater capacity to...