Symphony Number 6 for the Organ: Allegro

Posted on Mon Jul 15th, 2019 @ 12:27am by Master Chief Petty Officer Hans-Peter König
Edited on on Mon Jul 15th, 2019 @ 12:48am

Mission: War and Peacekeeping
Location: Holodeck

König approached the doors of the holodeck. It was a half-learned lesson that to-do lists perpetually regenerate: if you put off recreation until you have "taken care of business," you'll never get time for yourself. The Chief had never mastered that but at times he had let things fester too long without an outlet. This was one of those times and he was finally turning to the only escape that he had ever found effective.

Hans-Peter punched up the program from the panel next to the entrance to the holodeck. He usually used the panel. Speaking the commands to the computer ran the risk of passersby overhearing his request. What he was about to do was none of their goddamn business and he would prefer them to keep their booger-encrusted noses out of it. The computer acknowledged the program and informed him that he was clear to enter at his leisure. His leisure was now, so he entered.

He stepped in far enough for the holodeck doors to close behind him, his footsteps and cane falls echoing down the Gothic arcade before him. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. He felt---or possibly imagined---the slightest of breezes blowing across his face. At length, he opened his eyes. Light shined in from the windows along the top of the forty-meter nave just beyond the entrance hall. He observed the sanctuary at the other end of the Minster's main aisle. From where he stood, the only feature he could make out with any real clarity was the cross bearing the statue of Jesus hung prominently within the tall Gothic arch marking off the threshold of the sanctuary. He turned off from the entrance hall, seeking a staircase along the west end of the Minster.

He took his time making his way to the main organ of the Ulmer Münster. He had three to choose from in this massive edifice but he hadn't played this program before so he figured he'd start with the largest and most prominent of the three. The facade of the majestic 161-rank instrument loomed over the west end of the nave. When König finally reached the organ loft, he settled into the console and leaned his cane on the bench from behind him. The program already had Charles-Marie Widor's Sixth Symphony for the Organ resting on the console's stand. Hans-Peter, looked over the stops of the console, selecting and pulling stop-knobs. When he was satisfied with the registration, he turned the pages to the first movement. He positioned his hands over the great and his feet on the pedals of the first chord. The hall shook with the dramatic opening of Widor's opus.

#

A hundred kilometers to the northeast of the actual Ulmer Münster and twenty-five years before, a much younger Hans-Peter stood leaning forward against a safety barrier built around an observation deck overlooking the city of Heidenheim. Behind him stood the castle-turned-museum of Hellenstein and beside him stood Rahel Brandt. Wind blowing over the Hellenstein hillside picked up her medium-brown hair and whipped it over her shoulder, a few strands blowing into her face. Hans-Peter found it difficult to take his eyes off of her. She looked out over the city below as if he wasn't looking at her at all. No words passed between them. It would have been inappropriate.

#

The theme of the Allegro is followed by a fugue. Hans-Peter's hands flew up and down the manuals. He never quite mastered the technique to the degree his father had but years of practice allowed his hands to flow over the keys with ease. The fugue maintained some of the tension of the theme but almost none of the drama, leaving Hans-Peter free to think as the theme became reintroduced in the fugue. To think and to remember.

#

"I don't think you'll like university, Hansie." It was three years later. Hans-Peter and Rahel were wandering paths through the woods east of Heidenheim.

"You don't think I would cut it?" Hans-Peter responded to Rahel. They had been walking quietly through the woods hand-in-hand. Her comment had come out of nowhere.

"No. No!" Rahel stopped, forcing Hans-Peter to stop and turn to face her. Her brows were furrowed over her brown-speckled green eyes, "I think you'd do really well. I just don't think you'd like it."

"Can't be an electronics engineer if you don't go to college," Hans-Peter responded.

"Why do you have to become an engineer?" Rahel's free hand reached out to grab Hans-Peter's.

Hans-Peter shrugged, "What else am I going to do?"

"Isn't Kurt enlisting in Starfleet?"

"The Marines," Hans-Peter corrected, "And I don't want to join the military."

"Starfleet has technical specialties. You don't have to go into combat," Rahel let go of his hands and raised one to stroke Hans-Peter's ear. His hands found their way onto his waist, "My father was a transporter tech for a few years before he went to school. Never got anywhere near combat. I'm not saying don't go to school. I'm just saying that you're the kind of person who wants to do stuff. Maybe you should do stuff before you lock yourself in a classroom," an impish grin crossed her face, "Of course, you'll have to get assigned to Betazed to keep me company until I graduate."

Hans-Peter broke eye contact, looking down. He didn't really know what he wanted to do with his life but he suspected that Rahel was right. He didn't get much of a chance to think about it further at that moment because she had thrown her arms around his neck and pulled him in for a kiss.

#

It takes about nine minutes to play the piece König had chosen, depending on the tempo the organist picks to play it. Widor tended to play his own music slower than most other performers since his time so, as the composer intended, the runtime should probably have been between nine and ten minutes. König had learned Widor from his father who played it at the faster pace more typical of contemporary organists. So he had been playing for about four minutes when the theme's development began to pick up some of the drama of its introduction.

It is difficult to play this passage without it flaming fires of passion within the performer. It filled König with a kind of ecstasy and he started becoming lost in the fugue that followed.

#

Hans-Peter was dirty when he finally made it back to the FOB. He also couldn't remember the last time he had had more than a couple of hours uninterrupted sleep. Somehow, being dirty was worse. His team had been stranded on a barren rock identified by a catalog number instead of a proper name. The Jem'Hadar had done a fantastic job of proving why the Maquis were never actually successful and why they probably should have been following his team's lead.

They no longer had to worry about training that Maquis cell. In the words of the Marine captain in command of König's A-Team "It's hard to teach corpses to do much more than rot." The team was stuck on that nameless planet for weeks after the mission had gone tits-up. For all the talk about the Jem'Hadar's lust for battle making the Klingons' look like a casual interest those fuckers were patient. They stayed and watched long after there were no detectable signs of life on that world (König's team had very carefully gone to ground). It was tedious.

But the real crime was that they had separated Hans-Peter from a decent shower.

Even then, when Hans-Peter finally made it back to the tent that made a barely passable home on the FOB, his first priority was to read the letters from Rahel that had probably been piling up. They usually piled up. Communication lines being finicky in a warzone, their letters usually ended up getting delivered to each other in batches. He could stand being smelly for another hour.

There wasn't a batch of letters waiting for him. There was only one. He had heard upon return that Betazed had been invaded by the Dominion but that was a fact he had filed in the back of his mind without giving it much thought... until now. The letter wasn't from Rahel. It was from her father. He felt it was his duty as a fellow Starfleet veteran to be the one to inform Hans-Peter that Rahel's university had been hit during the Dominion's initial bombardment of Betazed and that Rahel had become a casualty of war.

#

Rage built up within Hans-Peter. His fingers pressed harder against the tracker-action manuals than was technically correct, his feet began stomping up and down the pedalboard. The rage cost him precision and the chords began to be muddled. He didn't care. He was gripped by the anger. Unlike a piano, the force with which the keys are struck has no effect on the volume of the notes. This is an obvious statement but since most organists start out on the piano it is a non-trivial fact that requires some retraining. The organ's indifference to König's force against the keys was not satisfying. His foot found the crescendo shoe and advanced it.

Stops that he had not pulled engaged and the music became louder as he concluded the final fugue and the movement began to swell. It wasn't loud enough. Hans-Peter advanced the crescendo shoe further. More ranks engaged. It still wasn't enough. His entire body had become invested in each chord. His foot smashed against the tutti piston and all 161 ranks engaged. The stone floor of the organ loft vibrated below him. The Minster's Hauptorgel filled the grand Gothic hall. The wet acoustics of the nave amplified and reverberated each chord of the movement until the full power and majesty of the wrath of God Himself became manifest through the music.

The last chord of the first movement of Widor's Sixth Symphony leaves the piece wanting for a resolution. The edifice's reverberation kept that chord hanging in the air a moment after the organ disengaged. That was part of the appeal of the piece for him: it didn't really end. All of the conflict all of the drama of the symphony's inaugural movement never really resolves. Whether that was good or bad was a matter of perspective. König he had long since stopped caring. He threw the sheet music to the floor beside the console, falling forward. His arms caught him on the key cheeks and he wept.

Silence reigned in the Minster for a period of time that Hans-Peter didn't bother to count. At length, he summoned the arch. Not having descended to the main floor of the Minster, it materialized awkwardly in the wall of the organ loft. König straightened up, wiped all expression from his face, picked up the cane, and slid off the bench. On his way out, he tapped the panel in the arch deactivating the program and exited the holodeck as the Minster dematerialized.