musicians of old

Chapter 901 Nighttime Ramblings (Part Two): Beethoven (Part 2)

But why is there no sound?
why.

Fanning longs to hear Beethoven's Ninth Symphony again.

He hadn't heard of it since he went to the old industrial world, let alone the Ninth Symphony personally conducted by the Music Saint.

The virtual world was cold and fragmented. Even the meaning of loneliness itself had been stripped away. Fanning sat in the audience of the theater as if he were in a huge nightmare theater with the mute button pressed. He could see the oboe's puffed-out cheeks, the string section's bows flying and the timpani players swinging their drumsticks violently. He could see the people in the chorus turning the pages of the sheet music and singing loudly... But everything was soaked in a suffocating silence.

Only the figure of the music saint danced on the conductor's platform, his face roaring silently.

In a moment when the baton struck down with lightning speed and then rose again like a rollercoaster, Fanning felt her heart being gripped tightly.

He knew he had reached the opening of the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, that earth-shattering start from the silence, the percussion bursting forth with thunderous brilliance, the orchestra about to unleash a torrent of descending and leaping notes.
After the introduction.

The string instruments played a dark, misty tremolo, with pure fourth motifs shifting in tonality appearing and disappearing in between, like the primordial chaos.

The material from the first movement was reviewed.

Then, a negative recitative interrupted it.

But still, not a single sound could be heard.

Even though Fanning knew that the recitative should have been sung as, "Ah! Friends, we don't want this kind of sound,"

"Is it really necessary?" he murmured to himself, sitting in the dilapidated and silent audience seats.

The dynamic octave notes leap downwards, leading to a fugue-like progression. The band lays out a transparent and light flow, with seemingly playful musical ideas carrying a slightly profound compassion and passion for life.

The material from the second movement is also revisited; Fanning paid homage to it in the second movement of her "Resurrection" Symphony.

Then, a negative recitative interrupted it again.

"Is it really necessary to do this?" Fan Ning was momentarily stunned.

The string instruments unleash pure harmonies like silk, and a song plays silently, variations, unfolds, meditates, introspects, and moves people deeply.

The material from the third movement was also reviewed.

Then, a negative recitative interrupted it again.

There remained a sense of loss and unease in the silence, as if everything was frozen in the cracks of time.

"Is it really necessary to do this?" Fan Ning clenched his fists in frustration.

"It has to be this way!!" But the next moment, a furious voice shattered Fan Ning's skull!

The ghostly figure actually turned around.

The stagnant silence was suddenly and violently broken through, and a saturated stream of light overflowed from the cracks in time. The music underwent a leap-like transformation, directly entering the most glorious choral section in the middle of "Ode to Joy"!

Their gazes collided across countless lost time and space!
"Do you remember the questions and answers I left in my handwritten notes?" Beethoven's piercing eyes struck Fanning's heart almost tangibly. "Then tell me, posterity, tell me. Has my call for 'millions of people to embrace each other' been answered?"

The music resumed, but Fanning had made a slip of the tongue.

"Tell me, has all of humanity broken free of its shackles, united as one, and stepped into that kingdom of freedom?" Beethoven continued with his stern question.

Fan Ning moved his lips bitterly.

All of humanity now
Hehehe. Hehehehe
For a moment, Fanning almost laughed, but tears came out of her eyes.

He recalled the fragmented "Noon" generation after the reset of History 0, and the collapsed world outside, shrouded in a morbid, desolate green hue, filled with opportunists, dictators, dangerous elements, and countless souls dissolved and mutated in the abnormal zone.

He has lived in a “cold” or “calm” way for a long time, ever since he shot and killed a teacher at the Santa Rambla subway station, and has never shed more than a few tears for anything.

But tonight, tonight.

Facing the music saint whom he once regarded as a spiritual sustenance and guiding light.

“They…we were once connected, we were even closer,” Fan Ning said in a low, strained voice. “But now, the world is once again shrouded in shadow, even more so than in your generation. The kingdom of freedom…it…” Haha.

Fan Ning couldn't continue.

Even though I am now also a "torchbearer," I can be considered to have reached a similar level as Beethoven.

Speaking of which, I once had the idea of ​​recreating "Beethoven's Ninth Symphony".

Are they worthy?

For the first time, Fanning felt endless exhaustion, and even ashamed.

Are you going to stay silent, young man?

Beethoven's tone did not seem to reveal any disappointment.

That volcanic and hurricane-like will, instead, coalesced into a penetrating insight into nothingness.

“But I hear thunder flowing in your spirit, and you wrote some works in your later life that are no less powerful than those of the Great Power. Your pursuit of the ‘Kingdom of Freedom’ must not be dead.”

“I ended them, with my own hands,” Fanning responded softly, “with a symphony in pure classical form, three hammer blows.”

"Is it because it has to be this way?" Beethoven pressed.

“It has to be this way,” Fan Ning replied immediately.

The same content, but with different roles for asking and answering questions, the two "torchbearers" from different times have been reversed.

"Then why shouldn't such a struggle be celebrated?"

Beethoven's rhetorical question suddenly rose in intensity.

Fan Ning was stunned.

He has always regarded "Night Pilgrimage" as the antidote to his Symphony No. 6 in A minor.

It's just an antidote.

He never imagined that he could use an adjective like "worthy of praise".

He never thought about it.

"Do you think I compose joy because I am in paradise? No, I have never actually seen it."

"It is precisely because I am in the deepest darkness that I must be the first to call for dawn! Fate? I have been fighting against it all my life! Schiller's poems in my hands are not a depiction of reality, but a javelin thrown into the distant future, a creation that pierces through nothingness!"

Beethoven's maxims echoed in this dilapidated theater, just like the magnificent variations in the "Eroica Symphony"!
“You are the master of the ‘Unending Secret’, there are some things you should have figured out on your own.”

"You say it's fragmented? Look at my music! Which great work wasn't forged from contradictory fragments, through the crucible of will, into a new whole? Goethe said, 'If man wants to enter the infinite, he must travel in every direction within the finite.' If the world of posterity has already collapsed, then it is still the raw material that posterity must traverse and give form and meaning to!"

"So, has the kingdom of freedom arrived?" Beethoven's gaze pierced through the layers of dark seawater.

He asked again.

Fan Ning looked up at him, his eyes regaining their clarity—

"It is coming."

The short man stared at Fan Ning like a lion.

For the first time, a sharp and gratified expression, almost a smile, appeared on his stern face.

"Then let's go create."

"Let the silence of past generations become the loudest prelude to your future symphony!"