In the commotion, the first to rise from his seat was a young man who had been talking with Winkler. His neatly pressed clothes and stiff-framed glasses gave him a very proper impression, but his stride as he walked to the stage was quite assured. In his hand he carried a violin.

Because Seydel Keller, the first musician, had held a particular love for the piano, the piano remained the dominant instrument in the music world to this day, but in recent years a growing interest in various other instruments had sparked an unexpected wave of enthusiasm for string instruments in the capital. 

The violin in particular was popular among women and merchants for its small size and ease of carrying. Her older sister had learned the violin in keeping with the trend among noble young ladies, and had she not met Sio, she might well have ended up playing the violin herself rather than the piano.

Stein took a bow on stage and the quiet audience broke into applause. After a brief silence, the strings began to vibrate with a rich chord. The sound that filled the air was the cry of strings pressed beneath a bow, something close to a wail. She found herself drawn to the entirely different quality of this sound compared to the clear, bright resonance of the piano, and slowly closed her eyes.

Csárdás. A piece commonly played by the common folk who lived on the outskirts of the capital, it depicted the sorrow of people living through hard days. The emotion that filled the opening was a deep, heavy melancholy. She let herself sink into the tragedy the music painted, carried along by the long, unbroken cry of the strings that showed no sign of fading. Within the reversal of notes that plunged sharply downward and then rose like smoke lay the winding hardships of a fleeting life and the anxiety over what the future held.

And yet these people never give up on life. They simply shake off the weight of a weary day over a drink and sing and dance for the tomorrow that is coming. No resentment toward the world, no longing for what they do not have. Everything disappears into the distance along with the melody ringing in their ears. The melancholy burns away together with the notes that gather speed, and what remains at the end is nothing but a fierce desire to live.

Even so, Niklas Stein’s melody was hollow. She was certain the audience could never truly resonate with his notes.

“The irony. Stein, born into a distinguished family, playing the commoners’ csárdás.”

Sio seemed to have arrived at the same thought, because he gave a wry smile and shook his head. The Stein family was one of the most prominent families even in the capital, where powerful households competed to display their influence, and had produced many officials in key parliamentary positions. Could a son of such a family truly capture the joys and sorrows of common people?

Niklas Stein had tried to express a world he had never experienced. That was, without question, a clear act of arrogance. No one in this world has the ability to depict a universe they have never lived through. Not even Sio, hailed as the genius of the age, could do that. And so the csárdás he was playing could never become his music.

The performance ended and applause poured from the audience. It filled the chapel, but Stein returned to the waiting area without a smile. No one knows better than the musician standing on stage whether their music has reached the audience. He had taken the stage and played, but he must have known his music had not reached them.

Following the emcee’s announcements, the next performers took the stage in turn. Each time, she quietly closed her eyes and listened to their music. But not one of them produced a sound she wanted to steal for herself. Partly because her standards had risen considerably from listening to Sio and Astaire, but that was not the essential problem.

The participants performed fast and explosive music, like people desperate to show off dazzling technique. They played their instruments caught up in a kind of frenzy she couldn’t understand, and the music that flowed from their fingertips was nothing but a collection of hollow sounds. Music is a language, and language carries emotion. Their performances were never music.

It reached its peak with Joel Winkler’s performance. The grotesque sequence of notes was nothing more than noise that fouled the air. Yet Joel Winkler returned to the waiting area with a deeply satisfied look, glancing around at the other participants with his chin raised. For the first time, she felt something close to pity for him, a man who had lost his sound by becoming drunk on his own technique.

“Next, Miss Danyu Astrid. Please take the stage.”

She drew a deep breath and rose from her seat. Sio said nothing and encouraged her with a simple nod. It was a thoroughly indifferent kind of encouragement, but it felt more like proof that he trusted her, and it put her at ease. She walked forward and passed through the waiting area door.

She stepped through the red curtain and onto the stage, and the eyes of the audience seated before her pressed into her from all sides. The looks of people murmuring among themselves held an unavoidable skepticism. She did her best not to meet their gazes and walked to the piano. She stood before the black grand piano and bowed, and the audience, who had already heard eight performers, sent her applause with visibly tired faces.

Amid the obligatory applause, she turned her gaze and scanned the audience. In the judges’ seats at the very center sat her mother, smiling with a gentle expression. Their eyes met and her mother gave a small nod of encouragement. She smiled back at her and then began to turn her gaze away.

As her eyes moved slowly, they caught on a head of platinum blond hair. In the dim chapel, the figure standing near the entrance at the farthest point from the stage was strangely vivid to her. 

The shape was tiny as a speck of dust, but she was certain it was Astaire. The way he leaned against the entrance, the air about him, it was unmistakably the Astaire Werner she knew. Knowing he likely couldn’t see it, she smiled toward him anyway.

The smile must have read as quite composed, because whistles sounded here and there from the audience. With those sounds as her backdrop, she settled into her seat at the piano, and the chapel soon fell into silence.

She placed her hands on the piano and lightly pressed a few keys. The wide, high-ceilinged chapel, built to sing the language of the gods, produced a more beautiful sound than anywhere else she had ever played. Here, she would perform her music. With a deep breath full of anticipation, the two hands resting on the keys began to move with care.

The eighth sonata. Seydel, who had given every piece a title to make his intent clear, had left this eighth sonata alone without one. People had debated for a long time why he had not given it a title. That he disliked the piece and so left it untitled, that a title had once existed but was lost over time, and other theories besides. But she believed the reason this piece remained untitled was that even Seydel himself could not be certain of the emotion he had poured into it.

Seydel, a great but lonely musician, composed this piece after losing his father, the one person who had ever truly understood him. His father had known nothing of music, and for that very reason he was the one person who never sought music from him. Seydel was a musician the whole world looked up to, but in his father’s presence he could simply remain a young son. 

What must the man have felt, the man who could only be fully himself in front of one person, when he lost that one person?

Long ago, Sio had read Seydel’s emotion in that piece as confusion. Following Sio’s notes, which became a lost child wandering without direction, she had seen Seydel trapped in a labyrinth. But when she had looked at the score alone, she felt neither confusion nor despair within it. Even now she did not know what Seydel had felt at that moment. Yet whatever it was, it must have been a feeling deeply unfamiliar to him. That much she could say with certainty.

The unfamiliar is fear. The left hand accompaniment that circles ceaselessly in place recreates the voice of a child trembling with fear. Within the fear lies a sorrow of unfathomable depth. The melody of the right hand, which lingers in the ear far longer than an ordinary rhythm, resonates with the anguish of a grieving child and rings through the space like a cry.

The strange balance between stillness and passion builds the tension, and a heaviness rises in the throat. Sio’s Seydel had surrendered to himself at the end of that tension and sank away forever, but her Seydel does not.

On the day she turned nineteen, she had turned her back and said farewell to everything that had been familiar. She had shed countless tears shaking free of the one person who had once been her entire world, but it had not led to a permanent standstill. Had it, she could not have stood in this place today.

When she wiped the tears from her eyes, she saw a bright light, and that light led her somewhere new. Just as it had been for Seydel, the new was frightening, but the moment she crossed beyond that fear, a universe she had never thought to look at spread out before her. 

There had been a time when the collapse of her world had left her paralyzed with fear, but in a universe carved out over countless ages, the world she had lost was only a small part of it.