The pianist drops dead in the middle of the third movement, the andante con moto in c- minor.

            His death is sudden, abrupt, as one might imagine a pianists’ death to be. There is no blood, no foaming at the mouth, no coughing or choking or gasping for breath—instead, it is all simple. Black and white, like the keys of the instrument he plays. One moment he is breathing, and the next he isn’t. He falls unconscious first, then his shoulders collapse, then his forehead falls to meet the instrument in front of him with a bang. The sound that follows is a jumble of chords that echoes off the walls of the concert hall and hangs heavy in the air afterwards like a stale wall of cigarette smoke. There is a scream—or maybe two—an order to call 911, and the urgent shuffling of approximately one hundred musicians who have never seen someone kick the bucket in the middle of a Beethoven rehearsal before. (People have come close, sure. But actually die?)

            The paramedics come and go, carting the pianist away on a long white stretcher. It was something with his heart, they tell the maestro, probably due to stress. Is there any immediate family he knows of that they can contact?

            No, the maestro replies. The pianist was a visiting musician from some Eastern European nation and hadn’t spoken a lick of English. The maestro doesn’t even remember his name, but he isn’t about to admit that. This is the first time that someone has died under his baton and he wants to appear as composed and as professional as possible. But clasped behind his back, his hands tremble.

            The maestro returns to the auditorium to address his troops, all of whom were left to mull about on stage while the paramedics tried and failed to resuscitate the limp pianist. No one is speaking. No one is playing. A silent orchestra is an odd sight to behold—everyone wide-eyed, some wiping away tears—but the maestro does not marvel at this irony. Instead, he steps up onto the podium and clears his throat.

            “I suppose you’re all wondering if the concert is going to go on as scheduled, after this recent turn of events,” he says. It is the orchestra’s last rehearsal before their opening concert of the season – or, it was, until the pianist died.  “Well, after a lot of thought, I’ve decided it is. And that’s that.”

            A flurry of conversation erupts from the ensemble. Voices, many of them indignant, cry out:

            “But what about the piano?”

            “Yes, what about the piano?” someone echoes. “The piece simply won’t be complete without it. What do you have in mind we use instead, a harpsichord?”

            “We’re not performing for Marie Antoinette, you idiot,” retorts the first-chair cellist. He was already having a bad day as it was—malfunctioning alarm clock, flat tire on the way to rehearsal, coffee spilt all over his nice new white button-down—and the sudden, incredibly inconvenient death of the pianist has just about set him over the edge. Not to mention the manner in which the maestro is handling this catastrophe, feigning nonchalance when a man has dropped dead right in front of everyone’s eyes.

            “We’ll just have to make do,” the maestro says. “After all, it’s what the pianist would have wanted.” He has no idea if this is true at all, but it sounds inspiring—and in times like these, morale is more valuable than truth. “Now please, please—let’s all pull ourselves together before we continue rehearsing. Fifteen-minute break.” He dismisses them with a wave of his hand.

            The cellist watches out of the corner of his eye as the maestro bounds down from the stage’s edge and retreats up the aisle. The first-chair violinist, a shy, slender woman with dark hair, follows him. She catches up to him in the doorway and they exchange a few words, then the maestro takes the violinist’s face in his hands and kisses her. They exit the auditorium together, and the cellist pretends not to notice their embrace, but inside, he is reeling. He turns around to where a group of his fellow musicians have gathered in order to distract himself.

            Someone to his right, he realizes, is crying.

            It’s a flutist. Of course.

            “He was so young,” half-whispers, half-sobs the flutist, dabbing a handkerchief to the corners of her eyes. She is young herself, fresh out of music school.

            “It all happened so fast,” agrees the trumpeter standing to her left. Admittedly, he never liked the pianist, but he’s decided to keep that to himself for now. His mother once told him that it is “rude to speak ill of the recently deceased” (or something like that) and although the trumpeter is not usually keen to take advice from his mother, he manages to hold his tongue just this once. He’s simply relieved that the concert is to go on as scheduled. His parents are flying in all the way from Sacramento tonight, and this is his one chance to prove to them that playing trumpet is just as respectable as being a lawyer or optometrist.

            “You don’t suppose it was murder?” he says.

            The flutist pales and nearly drops her handkerchief.

            “Why would anyone want to kill a pianist?” she gasps.

            The trumpeter can think of lots of reasons, actually. For example, music is to be performed with passion and exuberance, something this poor pianist certainly lacked. He’d been far too solemn, too rigid. A waste of perfectly good talent. 

            “Or perhaps it was suicide,” mutters the bassist. “I’d kill myself if I flew all the way from Albania just to perform with this group.”

            Everyone jumps—no one noticed him standing there. The bassist is a hulk of a man:  6’6”, overweight, and just overwhelmingly, exceedingly large. However, he’s accustomed to going unnoticed. It’s one of the great ironies of his life; another, for example, that he once earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering and now plays string bass in a symphony orchestra for a living.

            “The paramedics said it was something with his heart. Let’s not spread any rumors,” warns the cellist. 

            “Speaking of rumors!” says the trumpeter, beaming.  “I heard that things are getting awfully serious between the maestro and the first-chair violinist these days.”

            “What do you mean?” says the flutist. “Serious how?”

            “Don’t be stupid,” the bassist mumbles, rolling his eyes. “Remember when we caught them kissing in the practice room? It was disgusting.”  

            The cellist, red-faced, interrupts. “Is this the most appropriate conversation topic, uh, considering that someone just died?”
            “People die every day,” replies the bassist. He has started to wonder how many people will notice when he dies. Not everyone has the luxury of passing away in front of one hundred other people.

            “How can you say that? He was just a boy,” scoffs the flutist. “After all, we shouldn’t say anything bad. He might be able to hear us.” When she’s not playing flute, she’s watching ghost-hunting documentaries.

            “What, you think he’s haunting us now?” the trumpeter giggles. “Give me a break.”
            But all four of them are watching the piano out of the corner of their eyes, watching the still and silent keys, watching the tattered pages of sheet music on the stand, watching the Styrofoam cup of coffee the pianist had set next to him on the stage only minutes before his death – still fresh, perhaps still even a little hot.

            Five minutes later, with one less musician than they had before, the orchestra resumes rehearsal.

****

 

            No one bothers to roll the piano offstage.

            By the time the concertgoers arrive in the evening, it is still sitting in plain sight, much like an open casket positioned up front in a chapel for a funeral. Lonely and forlorn, a Steinway coffin.

            The audience members mutter as they take their seats: What happened? Did you hear? Awful, isn’t it? But all questions are shoved aside when the maestro saunters onstage to a roomful of applause, wearing his best suit and his best smile.

            As soon as the applause dies down, he taps the microphone and it whines in protest. The orchestra behind him winces at the noise. “Welcome,” he says, “to our very first concert of the season. We are so grateful for all of your support here tonight. But as you all must have heard, tragedy struck earlier today, on this very stage.”
            A concerned murmur ripples through the audience.

            “Before we begin our program tonight, I think that I can speak for myself and the rest of my orchestra when I say that this unfortunate loss of life has gotten us all to think about our own lives, and how devastatingly fragile they all are.”
            The cellist, sitting up front, squints in the stage lighting. Is the maestro tearing up?

            “Life is short, and altogether unpredictable. Which is why today, during a rehearsal break, I decided to ask this woman—” he gestures widely with his baton to the first-chair violinist, who jumps and then smiles timidly at the acknowledgement, “—to marry me. And she said yes.”
            The audience erupts into voluptuous applause and the maestro beams and bows, stepping down from the podium to take the violinist’s hand in his own and kiss it gently. A timpani player whistles and the crowd laughs.

            The cellist, who is suddenly finding it hard to breathe, dares to glance across the stage at the violinist. For a split second their eyes meet, as they so often do during a performance or a rehearsal as they watch each other for cues, keep track of each other’s movements. But then the maestro steps back up onto the podium in between them and their gaze is severed. The cellist winces as if a string on his instrument has just snapped in two.

            The maestro raises his baton; the concert begins.

            The first two movements run smoothly. For a moment, the orchestra seems to be so swept up in their music-making that they all forget about death, engagements, and whatever else. It isn’t until the third movement that the piano is supposed to enter the piece. This is, coincidentally, the same movement the pianist died playing.

            The cellist’s stand partner turns the page and he stares at the printed number and title 3. ADANTE CON MOTO IN C MINOR, his vision swimming in the stage lights above. Perhaps it’s the fact that he is about to play the soundtrack to another man’s death, or maybe it’s that the woman he’s been in love with for years just got engaged to another man, but when the maestro raises his baton in the air and counts off the measure—one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four—something inside the cellist snaps.

            Afterwards, he barely remembers it all: standing, letting go of his cello so that it falls to the wayside with a crash, splintering and sending wood flying like shrapnel in all directions. His knuckles colliding with the maestro’s jaw, the baton rocketing into the atmosphere. The startled gasps of an audience who have never seen violence break out during the middle of a symphony.

            The cellist is pounding the maestro’s face to the music, feeling the rhythm in his adrenaline. The maestro is hitting back, but his punches are frantic, uncoordinated, and they often miss their mark. Without the baton in his hand, he’s no longer in control. Suddenly, the cellist feels a strong hand on his shoulder and someone shoving him backwards. It’s the bassist, out of the shadows. He’s being noticed now, perhaps as much as one person possibly can, the spotlight illuminating the glistening beads of sweat on his forehead as he tries to break up the fight. He is center stage, the eyes of hundreds of concertgoers plastered on him as he tosses and turns with the cellist and the maestro.

            The orchestra, meanwhile, is trying with desperation to keep the piece afloat. Half of the stage is on one page while the other half has almost reached the end of the piece. The flutist, who was supposed to have a solo in the middle of the movement, is sitting with wide eyes gazing up at the balcony, where she swears she saw a ghostly figure—tall and lanky, like the pianist—drift through the air and then disappear through the wall.

            The trumpeter is thinking of his parents, who are sitting in the front row after flying in from Sacramento. He is thinking of his future, and how he would rather die before become a lawyer or an optometrist. So in this moment of chaos, he does the only thing he can think of.

The trumpeter jumps to his feet, knocking down the music stand next to him with the abruptness of his motion, blowing into the mouthpiece of his instrument with all the breath he possesses. The blare of the brass cuts through the mess of sound like a knife—sharp and vibrant and golden, each jazz riff climbing higher and higher than the last until his music has summited the height of even the tallest organ pipes. The trumpeter sways and begins to dance, the stage quaking underneath him. All around him, the rest of the orchestra has frozen.

            He pauses to take a breath, and there is only silence.

            The cellist blinks. His right eye is swollen shut and his mouth tastes like salt. The bassist has him pinned down on the stage floor and he can only twist his head, craning his neck to look around him. Out of the corner of his eye, the purple-faced maestro is groaning and massaging his jaw. The violinist is nowhere to be seen – did she dash backstage in all the chaos? Behind him, the trumpeter gasps for breath, the bassist’s chest heaves. The flutist is sobbing again.

            The cellist peers out into the crowd, where, until now, the audience has been sitting in stunned silence. Never before have they seen a concert performed like this. How thrilling! they whisper frantically to one another as the lights return and the velvet seats creak with their movement. How theatrical! Although hesitant at first, their applause eventually erupts into thunder.

            Maybe it’s the blood rushing through his ears, or perhaps it’s just pure imagination, but for a split second the cellist swears he hears the tinkling of piano keys, the opening notes of the next movement.

            He glances again at the crowd, their pink faces rapturous in the dappled auditorium lighting. The audience is giving the orchestra a standing ovation.