Music was Thomas Jefferson’s “particular delight, ‘an enjoyment, the deprivation of which . . . cannot be calculated,’ he declared in 1785. From early boyhood, he pursued this ‘passion of my soul,’ studying the violin with a teacher in Williamsburg, Va. By the time he matriculated at the College of William and Mary in 1760, his playing was so fluent that he was invited for weekly chamber music gatherings with the royal governor of Virginia.”