Chapter 78
Art doesn't make money.
Being an artist is a job for madmen.
To that proposition,
Langfer wholeheartedly agreed.
Of course.
He had spent at least twenty years in the moneyless art of music, after all.
Of course, there were certainly artists and musicians who were treated as masters and lived buried beneath immense wealth.
But he wasn't one of them.
His talent wasn't enough to reach the realm of the masters.
In the end, he'd only amount to an accompanist for small ensembles or shop events.
Even if life went a little better, he'd be no more than an educator teaching piano to promising little children.
So he gave up art.
Instead, he built a business sizable enough to keep him from envy and secured enough leisure to spend weekday afternoons lazily flipping through novels in a salon.
He was extremely satisfied with his life now.
It was certainly different from the past, when he'd nurtured empty hopes while staring at his lack of talent and a dream as narrow as a needle's eye.
Therefore.
"Hmm, a musician novel."
The novel by the up-and-coming author Ulysses, who had begun to make a name for himself in the salon with mostly war and political fiction, was...
"shoddy to the core."
It left Langfer thoroughly unsatisfied.
First of all, the protagonist is from a prestigious family, gifted from a very young age, and raised with the family's full support despite any abuse?
What kind of blatant convenience is that?
The parents would be killed off quickly, and then nothing but the protagonist's rise and triumph would be dragged out to the bitter end.
What's more, the plot was absurdly forced.
At seven, he was still just a tiny child, barely past baby babble.
And yet at an age when his hands still weren't even big enough for the keys, he holds his first public recital?
What does this writer take music for, anyway?
So he quickly lost interest in the novel and closed the newspaper.
Then.
Thud──
The wrapped paper that had been enclosed as a supplement with the newspaper fell to the floor.
With a faint ripple of curiosity, when he tore open the wrapping,
a single score was enclosed inside.
Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor.
Für Elise.
"Bagatelle" means a short piano piece in two- or three-part form, and No. 25 means it's the 25th piece.
"Seems he picked up a few things here and there..."
Langfer sneered again.
Still, he seemed to have done a decent amount of research; using technical terms was fine, but
slipping a score into a novel as a supplement?
What an inflated ego.
Is this author, Ulysses, perhaps incapable of embarrassment?
But to say it out loud...
there were quite a few of his fans in the salon.
He turned the score over with a smirk.
And then.
"……."
With a hardened expression,
as though his soul had been stolen by the devil, he stared at the motifs of the short four-page piece.
The first thing that washed over him was a shiver.
Then doubt.
No way.
It couldn't be a piece the writer composed himself, could it?
But this development of motifs...
In none of the pieces he'd ever played before had he encountered such audacious motifs that seized the mood so completely.
It was quite experimental, and...
yet precisely because of that, it seemed to seep even deeper into his heart.
"I can't take it."
As he read the score, with that ticklish feeling of the melody's end just within reach, yet not quite,
Langfer immediately headed for the piano at the edge of the salon, one that was only used when a music appreciation gathering was held every now and then.
He brushed the dust from the chair, opened the cover, tapped the keys, and checked the tuning.
It couldn't be called perfect, but it was sufficient to handle the current melody.
He took a deep breath
and let old memories rise once more.
And then.
After so long, he began to bring the melody forth again.
The gentle piano melody began to sweep through the salon, which had been noisy with literary chatter, and started striking the ears of those who had first wondered why there was suddenly piano music.
Those who had already encountered music in Peach World Tree Square nodded and recalled the thrill of that time.
Those hearing that melody for the first time today, here and now, were gradually drawn in by its free-spiritedness.
Since he had played it right after sight-reading it, there were admittedly quite a few awkward parts.
When the performance ended.
In the silence after the piano had completely fallen quiet.
Clap, clap.
Clap-clap-clap──
Applause rang out loudly from here and there, as if filling the empty space.
At the audience's response, something he hadn't felt in so long,
Langfer could feel his heart, which had been still for ages, beginning to beat again little by little.
Ah.
Yes.
This is music, and this is art.
And I──
"As expected, the piano is the best..."
Langfer trembled at the feeling of a lost soul returning to its rightful place, but
he himself also instinctively knew it.
His own performance was far too poor to capture the melody of this piece.
So he would have to keep practicing for a while.
Savoring that fullness, Langfer looked again at the composer's name written on the score.
Ludwig van Beethoven.
...It was the same name as the protagonist of the novel he'd just dropped, in publishing slang.
He had originally intended never to read it again, but
that performance changed Langfer's mind.
Whether it was the writer or someone else, and whoever had actually written the piece,
even if it was only a character in a novel,
he wanted to take a look at Beethoven's life.
This piece was, of course, worth that.
* * *
Until 'Beethoven' appeared on the pages of Novelpia,
it went through quite a few twists and turns.
"Why are you only here noooow──! There was nothing to read──!"
We even had to endure a surprise attack from Esthea, who had dark-evolved into a Poppy-corrupted version of herself after gobbling up anything and everything.
"What? A musician? Why write that as a novel? Can't you just grab someone and make them play it?"
"……."
Her way of thinking is simply different from ours.
It's the sort of thinking that says, if you can just kidnap someone, why bother writing about it?
Kidnapping is literally a way of life.
"Yellow."
"Hmm?"
"As a great and noble gold dragon, how about we at least conduct ourselves with some dignity? Human trafficking is a crime."
"That's right, Es-jang. That's a bad thing."
For the sake of the poor people who'd be kidnapped
and for my own safety, I teamed up with Historie to drill modern ethics and human-rights theory into Yellow.
Otherwise I'd be in danger.
"Hmm, but I thought I offered pretty good terms... I said I'd let them go after just ten years..."
"How can locking someone up for ten years possibly be a good term?"
The dejected Yellow thumped her tail and confessed the dragon lair's labor conditions.
"Kim Yul. How about we, just for ten years──"
"Stop. Pull yourself together, tin can."
...Honestly, the working conditions were so lax that I could even slightly reevaluate Esthea.
It was enough to make me think that if I ever crashed and burned as a writer later on,
I could just cling to Yellow and live happily out the rest of my life.
.
.
.
Also.
"How can a musician be the main character? Practicing all day, playing all day. Isn't that an incredibly boring life? I don't particularly want to see something like that, desuwa. It sounds boring and pretentious, desuwa."
The embodiment of capitalism, unable to understand the beauty of art.
There was also a minor issue with Chloe.
If this had been a private setting, I'd have just tugged her ears and given her a 'Apologize to every musician!' scolding, but
I am a man who strictly separates public and private matters.
"Eek──"
Instead, I stroked the ears of the cheeky elf who had publicly trashed an artist's life right in front of a pseudo-artist.
"Specialist stories have their own kind of fun. Why don't you read it first before judging, boss?"
I forcibly stuffed the draft I'd prepared in advance into Chloe's head.
Of course, I do agree to some extent that specialist fiction has a slight barrier to entry.
But.
An artist's daily life may not be exciting,
but an artist's life is certainly interesting.
And Beethoven's life was, needless to say, full of twists and turns.
After reading the full synopsis of the novel along with the draft, a spark lit up in Chloe's eyes.
"The smell of money...!"
The highest praise an elf could shout at me poured out.
"To think of selling the score together with it, Kim Yul, you're truly a genius! Just hire some obscure composer and slash the labor costs── eek!"
I took the anger of every low-tier artist into my hands.
I grabbed Chloe's ears with both hands and rubbed the tips vigorously.
Her face grew redder and redder, tears welling up at the corners of her eyes.
Hmm.
How should I put it.
Before I knew it, my inner sadism...
"Gasp."
Feeling like my mental world was getting a little weird, I hurriedly let go and declared proudly.
"I've already gotten cooperation from a composer I know well, so just prepare the pages and paper. Oh, and make some seats around that Peach World Tree over there too."
"Uii... understood..."
.
.
.
And now, just after serialization had begun,
"Boss."
"D-don't call me that, desuwa! When Kim Yul says it like that, it feels scary!"
After swallowing a sigh and looking at the fussy Chloe,
"Could you recruit some people for me, by any chance?"
"What kind of people do you mean, desuwa?"
"Musicians. If possible, good ones. I'll need quite a few."
A simple piano piece could be recreated and distilled like "Für Elise," but
recreating music that builds harmonies like a symphony or requires a concerto that way was somewhat difficult.
Fortunately, the score itself was public domain, so Historie's database could reproduce it almost perfectly right away.
- You're going to call lots and lots of people and hold a music concert? That sounds funnn! When? When are you doing it?
I could even rope in a reliable backer, the gold dragon who was always thirsty for thrills.
So.
Step by step.
I wanted to lay the groundwork for an orchestra.
Because practice would take a long time.
Well, not so much for the novel's commercial success as
it was basically an act of pure self-satisfaction.
Even so,
for now, in my memory,
the great musician who remained only within Historie's data,
I figured I could offer the Musical Sage that much of a tribute.
To put it a bit crudely,","it was music too precious for just me to hear."