Yes, that was probably the year when he had started locking the doors between his private concerts and an empty world.
He dumped the venison in his cave. He scrubbed his hands, blue-veined now, but still tough, still knowing Mozart, he thought, and walked—not with much pleasure of anticipation, but more like one externally driven—through the enormous hall that was so full and yet so empty, growing dim with evening, with dust, with age, with loneliness. Music should not be silent.
When the piano was uncovered, Brian delayed. He flexed his hands unnecessarily. He fussed with the candelabrum on the wall, lighting three candles, then blowing out two for economy. He admitted presently that he did not want the serene clarity of Mozart at all right now. This evening, the darkness of 2070 was closer than he had felt it for a long time. It would never have occurred to Mozart, Brian thought, that a world could die. Beethoven could have entertained the idea soberly enough; Chopin probably; even Brahms. Mozart would surely have dismissed it as somebody's bad dream, in poor taste.
Andrew Carr, who lived and died in the latter half of the 20th century, had endured the idea from the beginning of his childhood. The date of Hiroshima was 1945; Carr was born in 1951; the inexhaustible wealth of his music was written between 1969, when he was eighteen, and 1984, when he died in an Egyptian jail from injuries received in a street brawl.
"If not Mozart," said Brian to his idle hands, "there is always The Project."
Playing Carr's last sonata as it should be played—as Carr was supposed to have said he couldn't play it himself—Brian had been thinking of that as The Project for many years. It had begun long before the war, at the time of his triumphs in a civilized world which had been warmly appreciative of the polished interpretive artist, although no more awake than any other age to the creative one. Back there in the undestroyed society, Brian had proposed to program that sonata in the company of works that were older but no greater, and play it—yes, beyond his best, so that even critics would begin to see its importance.
He had never done it, had never felt that he had entered into the sonata and learned the depth of it. Now, when there was none to hear or care, unless maybe the harmless brown spiders in the corners of the auditorium had a taste for music, there was still The Project.
"I hear," Brian said. "I care, and with myself as audience I want to hear it once as it ought to be, a final statement for a world that couldn't live and yet was too good to die."
Technically, of course, he had it. The athletic demands Carr made on the performer were tremendous, but, given technique, there was nothing impossible about them. Anyone capable of concert work could at least play the notes at the required tempos. And any reasonably shrewd pianist could keep track of the dynamics, saving strength for the shattering finale in spite of the thunderings that must come before. Brian had heard the sonata played by others two or three times in the old days—competently. Competency was not enough.