Chapter 224
Translator: Dreamscribe
The cheering showed no sign of dying down.
Bravo!
Brava!
Whistles and applause shook the entire hall like waves.
It was a sight rarely seen at a classical concert.
“Holy crap.”
So-heon muttered with a dazed expression.
She had covered all kinds of performances as a reporter, but this was a first. A performer stepping down into the audience during the curtain call of a classical concert to embrace someone.
“Sunbae, I think I just captured something incredible.”
He showed So-heon the camera.
The photos captured Gyeo-ul gathering up the hem of her dress as she stepped down from the stage, the two of them standing face-to-face, and then the young couple embracing each other in succession.
The composition was beautiful enough to make even the viewer's heart race.
The red dress and navy tuxedo complemented each other perfectly. Even the lighting was flawless, making the pictures look like a staged fashion spread or stills from a movie.
“Wow.... Since when were you this good?”
So-heon clicked through the photos, marveling at them.
There was nothing to fix in the composition, lighting, or color. Best of all, the emotions between the two of them came through perfectly in the photographs.
Passionate emotions, expressions that could never have been staged.
The excitement, relief, and tender affection of two lovers who had only just confirmed each other's feelings had all been captured exactly as they were.
That was when it happened.
Han Ki-jun, Gyeo-ul's father, shot to his feet.
His face was bright red.
Some bastard was hugging his daughter. In front of thousands of people, no less. His mind went blank. All he could think about was getting down there and separating them first, consequences be damned.
But his wife, who was sitting right beside him, grabbed his hand.
“Don't go doing anything stupid. Sit down.”
“B-but!”
She shot Ki-jun a glare.
“Do you remember how old I was when I married you? What was it you said to my father back then?”
“Ahem.”
Ki-jun sat back down with an awkward expression.
He, too, had once been the man who took away his father-in-law's precious daughter.
“Still, she really is my daughter. She knows how to pick a man.”
“....”
Ki-jun crossed his arms and looked displeased, but he could not bring himself to argue.
The youngest-ever Fields Prize winner.
But even that title was not enough to fully describe him. At such a young age, he was already rewriting the history of mathematics.
On top of that, he was tall and handsome, with a spotless personal life. It would be difficult to find better son-in-law material than Yu Seo-ha anywhere.
Of course, that did not mean Ki-jun felt any better about it.
No matter how exceptional the boy was, from his perspective, Seo-ha was still a thief who had stolen his precious daughter.
'No, but shouldn't he at least ask for permission before they start dating?'
The audience was already in a festive mood.
“Waaaaah!”
“Kiss! Kiss!”
Laughter erupted throughout the audience when someone shouted teasingly.
Only then did Gyeo-ul seem to come back to her senses. She jolted and quickly pulled away from Seo-ha.
“Ah....”
Her expression said she had only now realized what she had done.
Gyeo-ul's face flushed red.
“S-sorry!”
“It's okay!”
Their eyes met, and both of them flinched before looking away.
'And now they're acting all shy around each other.'
Another burst of laughter broke out at the innocent awkwardness of the young couple.
“Yu Seo-ha, play!”
Someone shouted loudly toward Seo-ha.
Most of the people there had seen videos of the two of them playing together. Seo-ha was not quite at a professional level, but everyone knew he was an excellent pianist.
“Play!”
“Play!”
The audience's chanting showed no sign of stopping. Seo-ha looked at Gyeo-ul helplessly and mouthed the words.
'What do we do?'
“What are you waiting for? Everyone wants to hear you.”
Gyeo-ul flashed him a mischievous smile, took his hand, and led him toward the stage.
The reporters were stunned.
Classical concerts followed tightly structured programs. It was hardly an exaggeration to say that an unscheduled performer almost never appeared onstage.
“You seriously want me to play?”
“Yeah. But I'm not doing this just because I'm caught up in the moment. Somehow, I feel like if it's with you, we can give them a great performance.”
Before he knew it, Seo-ha had been brought onto the stage.
The moment he stood beneath the lights, thousands of expectant gazes bore into him. Everyone looked eager to see what he would play.
For the audience, today could hardly have been more enjoyable.
They had heard a deeply moving performance from Han Gyeo-ul, a top-class pianist, and witnessed an astonishing, unexpected event during the curtain call.
And now, on top of that, they were going to hear a surprise performance from one of the greatest mathematicians of the century. The very idea was enough to set the hearts of both classical music lovers and ordinary audience members racing.
Gyeo-ul looked at him and asked.
“Four hands?”
That meant two people playing a single piano.
But today was Gyeo-ul's recital. Seo-ha did not want to restrict the range she could move within.
“No, two pianos.”
A second piano was brought onto the stage. Seon-hwa looked up at them with concern.
'What on earth is she thinking....'
Putting on a stage-worthy performance as a piano duo required an enormous amount of practice.
Not only did both players have to know the piece perfectly, they also needed to match everything else, from the subtle push and pull of the tempo, to pedal timing, breathing, and the length of each rubato. Gyeo-ul's recent performances in particular had contained a strong improvisational element. If her partner could not read her flow, the piece would fall apart in an instant.
“Do you need the score?”
Seo-ha shook his head at Gyeo-ul's question.
“I knew it.”
Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, K. 448. [TL Note: https://youtu.be/9iePyP2HOr8?si=HjfrKpPN8anATcvI]
That was the piece they had chosen.
Seo-ha had never performed this piece before, either as a duo or by himself.
But Gyeo-ul had a reason to trust him.
It would hardly be an exaggeration to call every classical music major a master of memorization. They had to perform dozens of concertos and sonatas without sheet music.
But Seo-ha's memory existed on an entirely different level.
Back in high school, how shocked had she been when Seo-ha not only memorized a piece after hearing it once, but even wrote out the entire score? That shock had only lasted a moment before Gyeo-ul's mischievous streak took over. She had wanted to find out just how far his musical abilities went.
“Then this one is played on two pianos. Can you write this one out too?”
Click.
Music began playing from the player.
Seo-ha listened with his eyes closed. The moment the piece ended, he immediately picked up sheets of staff paper.
Scratch scratch.
Gyeo-ul was dumbfounded.
Separating the sounds created by two pianos into their individual voices and committing them to memory was difficult even for trained musicians. Yet Seo-ha had done it effortlessly.
Watching him, Gyeo-ul remembered the legendary story passed down about Mozart.
In the eighteenth century, Allegri's Miserere was a piece performed only in the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican. The papal authorities had strictly forbidden the score from being circulated.
In 1770, the fourteen-year-old Mozart visited Rome with his father. It was said that after hearing Miserere only once in the Sistine Chapel, he returned to his lodgings and immediately transcribed the entire piece from memory.
Moreover, Miserere was a nine-part choral work lasting well over ten minutes.
Gyeo-ul had found herself marveling anew that perhaps geniuses really did have something in common with one another.
Gyeo-ul finished preparing first.
Seo-ha sat down and closed his eyes. In that fleeting instant, the musical figures of Mozart he had heard eight years ago fluttered through his mind like cherry blossoms.
Whish.
The notes scattered rapidly before finding their proper places.
And at last, all that remained was Mozart's beautiful music.
The two of them began to play.
Gyeo-ul introduced the theme with a clean touch, and Seo-ha followed.
'Oh? Improvised?'
Jansen, conductor of the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, stroked his chin as he watched the performance. Before asking Gyeo-ul to perform with the orchestra, he had intended to use this opportunity to assess her ability.
'I suspected as much, but they really didn't rehearse this beforehand?'
He had been a conductor for twenty years.
Even among the sounds produced by dozens of orchestra members, he could tell how much practice each individual had put in.
His eyes gleamed.
At first, he had assumed it was simply an entertaining bonus performance.
Something like a spontaneous stunt by two young people swept up in their emotions.
But the moment the first note rang out, he knew immediately. Han Gyeo-ul was more serious than ever.
'She has no intention of giving them a half-baked performance? But if she plays a duo with an amateur, surely their coordination will falter?'
His concern proved unfounded.
Mozart's characteristic crystalline progression. The balance of the interlocking lines as the two players traded phrases. The young man's tone was rough, but never clumsy.
'He's way too good.'
He was easily better than the average conservatory student.
But what was most astonishing was that Gyeo-ul was deliberately trying to throw him off. She was clearly twisting the tempo ever so slightly on purpose. She lengthened and shortened her rubato, testing her partner. An ordinary performer would have lost the flow here.
Yet the young man followed every change precisely, as though he had known what she would do before she did it.
'Tuning?'
The sounds of the two players were falling into alignment, like the strings of an instrument being tuned after years without use.
The corners of Gyeo-ul's lips slowly curved upward.
And in the next moment, the highlight of the piece began.
Boom!
The third movement, Allegro vivace.
Both pianos began racing forward at once.
Shiver-
Goosebumps rose across Jansen's skin.
A sound that could never be produced by a single piano. K. 448 was a piece built around exactly that. One imitated the other, chased it, answered it, and sometimes confronted it, creating an overwhelming sense of three-dimensional depth.
Gyeo-ul tossed out the theme with her right hand.
Seo-ha caught it skillfully and returned it in the lower register. The rich layers of sound created by the two of them filled the entire hall.
'It's almost like they're having a conversation.'
Had harmony always been this beautiful?
Even the way their pedals rang and their notes resonated was different, not just their touch. Jansen was so moved that a tear slipped out before he even realized it.
The music itself was wonderful, but more than that, he felt as though he understood the hearts of the performers.
'Just how deeply must two people trust each other to make a performance like this possible?'
No, this was beyond mere trust.
Musical Entrainment.
It referred to the phenomenon in which people's brains and bodies synchronized with one another while performing music. At that very moment, the two of them were likely feeling each other's emotions as intimately as though they were their own.
The atmosphere inside the hall changed.
The climax.
The two melodies intertwined into one.
The high and low registers began spiraling upward around each other.
Without realizing it, Seon-hwa raised a hand to her mouth.
Everyone else was just as stunned. No one had expected the two of them to produce a performance of this caliber.
Bang-
The final chord.
At last, the two melodies met at their peak, delivering an immense catharsis to the audience.
From the floor to the walls and all the way to the ceiling. The resonance spread throughout the entire hall.
“My God....”
The words someone breathed out seemed to speak for everyone present.
No one applauded.
Not until the resonance had completely faded away. And when the last lingering traces of emotion had seeped into the deepest corners of the hall, someone finally brought their hands together.
Clap clap clap!
Thunderous cheering erupted.
“Waaaaah!”
“That was amazing!”
Jansen slowly shook his head.
Over the course of thirty years, he had seen hundreds, even thousands of performances. He had watched the greatest musicians in the world perform after rehearsing together for months. But he had never witnessed anything like this.
“So truly moving music does not come from the score after all.”
For the first time in a whole decade.
He slowly rose from his seat.
It was a standing ovation for the two performers onstage.
*****
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