The First Silence
リハーサル中、最高音が突然聞こえなくなる。作曲家は恐怖を誰にも打ち明けられない。
Anton Reyner had conducted his own symphonies for twenty years, and he trusted his ears above every other instrument.
On the morning of the rehearsal, the orchestra assembled beneath the tall windows of the concert hall.
He lifted his , and the strings began the passage he had written the previous winter.
The music climbed steadily toward its highest phrase, where the violins were meant to shine like cold light.
Then, without warning, the topmost notes simply vanished, as though a hand had closed over them.
He could see the violinists drawing their bows, their faces bright with effort, their fingers moving.
Yet the brilliant sound that should have crowned the whole passage never quite reached his ears.
For a moment he wondered whether the players had made some careless mistake in their counting.
He tapped the stand sharply and asked them to repeat the difficult phrase once more.
They played it again, precisely and beautifully, and again the highest dissolved into nothing.
A thin, cold fear began to gather somewhere beneath his practised , quiet yet .
He forced his face into the calm mask that conductors wear when something has gone wrong.
"Very good," he said, though the words tasted strange, "let us move on to the second theme."
The rehearsal continued, and to everyone in the hall the great Reyner seemed entirely himself.
Only he knew that a small, bright country of sound had disappeared from his hearing.
He told himself that could dull the ears, that a night of rest would restore them.
He had worked without sleep for weeks, bent over the unfinished score of his Fourth Symphony.
Surely, he reasoned, this silence was nothing more than exhaustion wearing a briefly frightening disguise.
But is a poor comfort when the body has begun to keep its own secrets.
That evening he sat alone at the piano and struck the highest keys one by one.
The low and middle notes answered him , warm and round beneath his tired fingers.
The highest keys, however, moved in silence, their hammers falling on a world he could no longer enter.
He pressed them harder and harder, as if sheer force could back the vanished ringing.
Nothing came, only the dull knock of felt on wire and the pounding of his heart.
He closed the lid gently and sat for a long time in the darkening room.
He resolved to tell no one, not the orchestra, not his daughter, not a single friend.
A composer who cannot hear, he thought bitterly, is a secret too dangerous to share.
And so he carried his first silence home alone, and locked it inside like a crime.