A Meeting

Snow fell wild and windy on the city of musicians. A boy, brimming with morning light, stepped out of the doorway into the street. He was greeted with a dancing of snow. The boy looked up into the whirling snowflakes and imagined them carrying musical notes on their backs as they fell to earth. Their movement weaved a melody, building harmonies as they moved, until the entire snowstorm became one great magnificent exploding symphony.

An old woman that happened to be walking past noticed the electrified expression on the boy’s face and wondered on his mental state. Whether there were clouds. It had something to do with the gaze within his gaze. It was impossible to say exactly where his music itself was sourced, whether it was the soul acting in nature, or nature acting in the soul. Or if they were one thing united, indivisible.

He had been sent to Vienna by his father who desired his son to experience newness with an independent air and by doing so expand his already prodigious talent. His father, who himself was from a musical family, recognised a genius in his son that he didn’t himself possess, which was a catalyst for his heavy drinking. However, he saw his son’s potential, and the potential therefore for the entire family. That decided it. As he walked along the crowded thorough-fare of the metropolis the boy hoped to dedicate his life to music.

Earlier that morning he had captured the moment when the snowfall begins. That miraculous event when you look out of a window and it starts to snow. “There are miracles in nature.” He thought. The intensity of its beauty moved him deeply. Only air to behold, and from this nothingness nature creates a fleeting thing that remains permanent in the soul. It was these moments, these emotions, these experiences, that he wanted to behold in music. The boy felt like a stranger in the city, but he didn’t feel alone. He was already registering the burgeoning of his precocious talent by degrees, art and architecture yielded as the unshielded metropolis wielded. Not quite sure what the rules were, he was nevertheless intent on breaking them.

He had been told by Franz that his hero lived somewhere nearby, and he kept the address safe in a buttoned pocket. Being in Vienna was the fulfilment of a kind of prophecy, rather than the search for mere work, mere sustenance. The scope and beauty of the city was gifting him an excitement he hadn’t experienced before. Music re-entered his mind uninvited. He could hear the sound of violins above his tinnitus. (The first symptoms of his deleterious hearing were beginning to manifest but he was able to carry on regardless). He looked back up at the snow but this time there was silence. He wore only a shirt and a waistcoat under his overcoat and as he re-entered the world from his dreams he began to shiver. He tilted his head forward and stamped on through the snow to adventure the city, hoping to collect its offerings. His hair was getting long and unkempt and the breeze fluttered in his curls. He pushed his scarf back under his coat and trudged on, making a rhythm from the crunching snow underfoot. He walked on and soon came to St Stephen’s cathedral.

The boy’s hero was also a musician, based now in Vienna. His fame had spread across Europe. The boy had first heard his music through his music tutor Herr Neefe. It was a bellows. He recalled the moment as he walked, and it was in that moment of wind and snow the boy thought ‘Is it the purpose of my life to serve myself? My own happiness? Or is it to serve others? Which should I prioritise?’ He paused for thought and looking up saw an old man sitting on an icy step in a doorway begging for money. That seemed to make up his mind.

Not far away from the pensive child stood his hero by a high window watching the snow falling between the buildings. The street was busy with the morning throng and the snow just added to the ebullience of the moment. The older musician was now thirty-one years of age and his brilliance was flowing like spring rivers. One snowflake in particular caught the musician’s eye and he followed it down to the street where it landed in the boy’s outstretched hand. He smiled and returned to his billiard table where the score of his latest symphony was fanned out on the purple baize.

A knock on the musician’s door sounded out and a servant girl said that there was someone there to see him. She passed him a letter of introduction from Max Franz who knew them both. They would gift the world an immense joy, inventing a new kind of wonder. The kind that belittles warmongers, the kind renders borders and nations obsolete, the musicians became inventors of the means of redemption. The older musician was put out as he was at work and told the maid to tell the boy to return at one o’clock when he would be pausing to eat. Delighted, the boy agreed, asking to wait indoors because of the cold weather. And so he was offered a chair in the lobby where he sat and dreamt of music. He thought about what Neefe had told him in between bars of invention. He listened in the hope of hearing his hero play but no sound came from the salon. At last the boy was asked to follow the maid into the room where the musician waited. The man with the large blue eyes looked up from the billiard table as the lad entered the room.

“Welcome.” The boy looked nervous as he beheld his idol. There he was. His face apparent, his keen wide eyes glowing. To the boy it was like looking at a figure from history, a legend of the past, even though he was living and breathing in front of him. He gazed in awe at the face that for all future generations would remain mysterious. His wig lay on a seat and the composer’s fair hair curled chaotically over his forehead. For a moment there was silence. It was like seeing a cyclone visible on the horizon. Verging on bewilderment the boy blurted,

“Thank you. You are Herr Mozart?”

“Well of course. Haha. You have come to see me, Franz sent you is that correct?’ The boy nodded eagerly. “He recommended you highly.” Something in Mozart’s expression however, remained aloof, distant almost, but still engaged in the moment.

“Come, play me something.” The older musician poured himself some red wine from Chianti. The boy remembered his father and worried it was too early in the day to be drinking. Mozart sat in his comfortable chair near the billiard table and looked over at the piano. A roll of his hand and the subtle raising of eyebrows suggested to the boy he should begin to play. Now was his chance.

With some trepidation the boy walked over to the piano and sat down. He could not hear the silence through his tinnitus but he could imagine it, and through his imagination he got the measure of its feeling. It was through his imagination that breakthroughs were made, the music and the mind could not be fused without it. His imagination was the reality he trusted best. He played a piece, and the elder musician listened. The boy’s technical ability wasn’t in doubt but his imagination had yet to be revealed to Mozart who waited expectantly. The boy finished the rehearsed piece and Mozart rolled a billiard ball across the table, nudging another ball back towards his open palm. Mozart said nothing. The boy, anxious to please, became worried, even though his performance was faultless.

“Perhaps”……………..They both said simultaneously. Mozart laughed loudly. Then the boy said,

“Perhaps I can improvise something?” Mozart suddenly became alive.

“My sentiment also. Well, what do you have in mind? Or shall I decide?”

“You decide. If I decide how will you know I am improvising?” Said the boy. Mozart smiled. The child had him stumped, a sentiment he did not entirely welcome. He paused a moment keeping his eyes fixed on the boy at the piano. Then he walked over to the billiard table, picked up the score he was working on and put it on the piano stand so the boy could read it.

“Try this.” He said. The boy looked up at his hero afraid to smile, as if emotion could wrong foot him somehow. Just by looking at the first few lines of the piece the boy could detect Mozart’s hand. Then he began to play, improvising without rehearsal on the initial charge. His performance roared into life, solving galaxies. Mozart, who had been sitting, sprung to his feet when he heard the collision of instinct and imagination the boy was displaying, and stood fixated, eyes closed, with his hand slowly rising upwards. From an adagio in D# he moved unexpectedly into a sublime allegro that seemed to build and build from divine foundation. The boy ended the piece in a crescendo that reeled in a way that almost wrong-footed Mozart, but not entirely. The boy still had a long way to go. A lot to learn. Then there was silence. Mozart didn’t applaud but instead walked over to the piano where he stood in front of the prodigy. The boy looked up at him not knowing what was going to happen. A loud throbbing ringing sounded out in the boy’s head increasing in volume moment to moment and his smile turned to an expression of pensive anxiety. Mozart coughed, and then again. The third cough was loudest. ‘Marvellous.” Said Mozart. Beethoven smiled.