Side Story: A Musician’s Letters

Preface to the Revised Edition

Three hundred years ago, the royal capital stood at a peak of musical flourishing that had few parallels in the long history of music. Remarkable musicians who remain central figures in music history today walked the streets as a matter of course, and new music was born every day in small salons scattered throughout the city. It was, in every sense of the word, a golden age of music.

There were those who led that golden age from the front. The composer Sio Lieselotte, and his longtime friends the pianists Danyu Astrid and Astaire Astrid were its central figures. These musicians, who left an indelible mark on music history, produced countless immortal masterworks through their ceaseless exchange and debate, and their 184 surviving letters offer a window into that creative process.

Some scholars do not recognize these letters as official records and exclude them from historical texts, yet even they acknowledge the letters’ value as reference material that illuminates the daily life of the era. Another significant advantage is their exceptional state of preservation: unlike other sources whose contents are difficult to decipher due to poor condition, these letters were kept by the descendants of the three figures and have survived in remarkably fine shape.

The letters were donated to the public after the deaths of the three, but they are currently restricted from public access due to an unfortunate incident. For that reason, A Musician’s Letters presents a curated selection of 50 letters from the original 184, with the aim of helping readers understand the spirit of the age and the musical world these three inhabited. The first edition was published three years ago, and this revised edition adds ten letters not included in that original release. Where letters sustained damage that made specific words impossible to confirm, the text was rendered according to the flow of the passage and marked as a paraphrase. Additional information necessary for understanding the content has been provided in footnotes.