So what if you don’t understand? So what if you think I’m a half-woman freak.
This is my song. My voice. My voice leads.
Katrina glared up from Aubergine at an audience she could not see.
But then, she sensed something completely unexpected. Some of them seemed to be singing too.
Fuga—a theme, introduced by one part and successively taken up by others. Somehow other voices, other musics, began to interweave with her own. The notes, the harmonies wrapped her gently, like a blanket of night in a field of stars. She wanted to reach out, tell them she didn’t know, she had no idea they were with her, tell them now they would never again be alone.
But then she remembered that their reactions were merely due to the dogwood bow.
Third Movement: Melodia （Adagio）
Adagio.
Even people who didn’t know music knew the sweeping, inescapable sadness of Barber or Albinoni. A song of mourning. A song of loss.
Yet, unlike Barber or Albinoni, Bartók did not title his movement Adagio.
Instead, he named it Melodia.
Katrina thought of her mother arranging pork buns and tamales in the big family steamer. She remembered her father’s steady voice as he taught her how to tie shoelaces. She could taste the turkey legs and funnel cakes she shared with her cousins that afternoon at the Los Angeles County Fair.
She saw her teacher smiling when she told her parents that their son had a natural gift for violin—and the Thanksgiving both her father and uncle declared to the family they would stop drinking, and everyone toasted with sparkling cider.
It is not enough to blindly flee pain or danger. It is not enough to escape from an irredeemable enemy.
Heartache comes from glimpsing over one’s shoulder, the yearning for Thanksgiving, the persistent memory of the sweetness.
Breaking comes from knowing exactly how it could have been.
Sadness, regret … these come from more than being just a victim, an innocent survivor. They come from seeing wasted chance after wonderful, wonderful wasted chance.
They come from knowing the good that has slipped through your fingers, as well.
How had Katrina underestimated Miss Astrid? How had she turned a blind eye to Miss Satomi losing her music? How had she hung up on her mother last night?
And just this morning, how had she wished that Miss Satomi might save her from Hell?
You’re a selfish little thing, aren’t you?
How do we mourn when we know that we, too, have been cruel to both the living and the dead?
For all the lifetimes of being mistreated, mistrusted, broken, lost. For all the lifetimes of bullying, betraying, cowardice, and shame.
Yes, there is music as this. And yes, this music is you.
Fourth Movement: Presto
Presto—very fast. Presto—as if by magic.
At the fourth movement, some people thought, “The Flight of the Bumblebee!” Finally, a passage they could recognize! But this was no overplayed Rimsky-Korsakov insect—this was the frantic chaos of refugees escaping a war.
So, a scream?
Yet some of the more astute observers noticed she had muted her violin.
Then, a whisper?
Was the pizzicato to be jarring or soothing? Was the counterpoint unexpected or welcome? Throughout the sonata, through each movement, the audience saw, felt, believed—who they were, what they valued, whom they loved.
But of what could they be sure?
Where does truth, ultimately, lie?
Presto. What is magic, anyway? If magic is more than illusions on a stage, if magic can actually change the world, then what is reality but a song that one imagines and sets free?
The fourth movement held the most infamous feature of Bartók’s entire sonata: quarter tones. These were the tones between piano keys, notes between notes. Here, the violin fingerboard showed no wear, for these were signs of bad intonation, or even worse, a bad ear.
Yehudi Menuhin had asked Bartók to rewrite this section conventionally, not only because of the technical difficulty, but because to him the deviation seemed unnecessary.
Unnecessary?
Why did Bartók write this for violin? After all, he was a pianist. Why write for the violin, even while dying of leukemia? Why did Miss Satomi teach her? After all, she was the Queen of Hell. Why spare her student, even as she was dying for souls?
Unnecessary?
Here, with her fingers upon the in-between places, Katrina played a deviation that the instrument thought was wrong, the audience thought was wrong, that everything she had learned about intonation and harmony thought was wrong. Here, where even Aubergine’s resonance became cold and faraway, Katrina drew her bow across the strings, quickly, smoothly, roughly, flirtatiously, desperately.