The Premiere
満席の劇場で自作を指揮するが拍手が聞こえない。振り返って初めて観客の熱狂を見る。
On the night of the , the great hall was full to its ceiling.
Reyner stood in the , his score under his arm, his heart loud where his ears were quiet.
He could no longer hear the murmur of the crowd, but he could feel its warmth and weight.
He walked out to the , and a wall of movement rose to greet him: the audience applauding.
He saw a thousand hands beating together, and he imagined the sound he could not receive.
He turned to the orchestra, lifted his baton, and brought it down upon the first great chord.
The players began, and Reyner conducted from memory, from the score printed inside his mind.
He knew every entrance, every , every silence, more surely than he knew his own name.
He shaped the music with his hands and his whole body, trusting the players to answer.
He could hear only the deepest tones, felt through the floor and the wood of the .
The rest he supplied from within, the imagined orchestra playing in perfect step with the real.
When the fourth movement arrived, he felt it break over the hall like a rising .
He could not hear its triumph, but he could see it on the faces turned up toward him.
He drove the music to its final chord and held the players there, trembling, then released them.
Then came a silence that, for him, was no different from all the silence before it.
He lowered his arms slowly, , uncertain whether he had triumphed or merely finished.
For a long, terrible moment he stood with his back to the audience, hearing nothing at all.
He did not know that behind him the entire hall had risen to its feet as one body.
At last he turned around, and the sight struck him where sound no longer could.
A thousand people stood, their faces shining, their hands with the speed of their clapping.
Flowers were falling, mouths were open in cries he would never hear, eyes were wet like his own.
The applause he could not hear was written plainly on every face in the room.
He understood, in that moment, that he had reached them across the silence after all.
The music had left his soundless world and entered theirs, whole and living and loud.
He bowed, and the movement of bowing shook two tears loose to fall upon the .
He gestured to the orchestra, to the score, to the music itself, giving away the .
And in the he could not hear, Anton Reyner had never in his life felt less alone.