Purge
"The modern orchestra is a classic example of how the magical and Muggle worlds can be integrated. With the exception of a few talented wizards as well as witches, history's greatest composers and conductors have for the most part been either Squibs or Muggles. If we consider that the art of music is today accepted as a study of magic in one of its most primal forms, then surely even Muggles who create music could be considered as capable of manipulating magic."
Excerpt from the 'One World' lecture series by Hermione J. Weasley, Honorary Professor of Muggle Studies, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
"While it is common knowledge that only those with magical blood can actually use racing -brooms, it is less commonly known that some of the greatest Quidditch players the world has ever been blessed to see were all Squibs. True, they mostly couldn't wave a wand to save their lives, but just like the potioneers, we in the Quidditch world are not ashamed to acknowledge that some of our heroes were about as magical as a puffskein."
Quoted by Gwenog Jones, Captain of the Hollyhead Harpies.
The year was 1932.
A myriad of sounds rose up from the Quidditch pitch as the Hogwarts Symphony Orchestra tuned their instruments and prepared for the night's performance. From the thundering rolls of the timpani to the whistling trills of the woodwinds, the pitch was just as noisy as it would have been during the Quidditch finals, and the audience being curious as to just what Professor Roth had up his sleeve for them certainly contributed to the racket.
When the esteemed professor himself stepped out onto the pitch, the audience rose as one to their feet. The orchestra's instruments went silent, giving way to a polite round of welcoming applause as the elderly conductor stepped up to the podium. All eyes were on him as he spoke into a strange, bottle-like device, which amplified his voice as a Sonorus charm would have done.
"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome!" Roth called out, drawing a few cheers from the audience. "It is my great pleasure to welcome you to tonight's performance by the Hogwarts Symphony Orchestra, so let us give them a warm welcome."
The assembled musicians stood, all eighty-eight of them, basking in the audience's adoration. Roth stepped off the podium to shake the concertmaster's hand, and the seventh-year Ravenclaw's smile could not have been wider.
Once the orchestra was seated and he had stepped back onto the podium, Roth turned to address the audience once more.
"As we all know, these are… dark times. Many among us have lost friends, relatives, and loved ones. Out of respect for those who have been lost, tonight…" Roth's voice trailed off as he swept the audience with his gaze. "We shall begin in silence, and end in silence. Above all, we, the musicians of Hogwarts, hope that through our efforts tonight, it will be remembered that it is only during the darkest of nights that hope's candle burns brightest.
"Without further ado, I present to you, Requiem."
"It is a well-known fact that prior to Grindelwald's reign of terror the less fortunate of the Hogwarts students owed their education to two primary benefactors. Namely, these were the Hogwarts Quidditch league and the Hogwarts Symphony Orchestra. While this may appear unfeasible in Hogwarts as we know it today, it was entirely possible in those days, when the Hogwarts student body consisted of over two thousand students, and when the population of the magical United Kingdom exceeded sixty thousand individuals. Hence, the amateur Quidditch teams at Hogwarts played at what was, at the very least, an international level by today's standards, and the school orchestra was made up of student musicians who more than once performed before none other than His Majesty.
If anything, the fact that the Hogwarts population has remained approximately constant since Grindelwald's defeat – barely a quarter of what it once was - coupled with the disbanding of the Hogwarts Symphony Orchestra and the apparently irreversible decline of the Hogwarts Quidditch team probably makes Gellert Grindelwald the single most damaging individual in the history of Hogwarts."
Excerpt from 'The Comprehensive Chronicle of British Magical Education', by Emeritus Professor Bathilda K. Bagshot.
Silence filled the Quidditch pitch, as thick and suffocating as congealing blood, as Professor Roth flicked his conductor's baton, spurring the orchestra into action. The harp sliced through the silence like a knife, supported by the mellow, almost ominous voice of the cellos.
Abruptly, the strings were silenced, and the rattling sounds of a xylophone echoed in the night like a shaken bag of bones. Several gasps were heard coming from the audience, even as the strings came to life with a sinister buzzing, not unlike a hive of enraged bees. And much like a swarm of furious bees the music seemed to attack the audience's ears without pulling any punches.
The woodwind players could be seen screwing up their faces in concentration as they played complicated passages of what sounded like the highest notes their instruments were capable of, and the brass section was like rolling thunder as the string players worked themselves into a manic frenzy. Drumsticks, mallets, and cymbals answered the call from the other sections, beating out the pulse of the music.
It was amazing, it was complex, it was masterful.
Suddenly, the entire orchestra went silent, and all the lights on the pitch went out. Breaths were held and some murmurs were heard, as ears strained to pick up even the slightest sound from the orchestra.
When the lone oboe's piercing cry shattered the quiet like glass, followed by the bassoons' slurred, warbling notes, it became clear just what Roth had been trying to accomplish with his newest work.
By the time the performance ended, there was barely a dry eye on the pitch.
"Laugh at the Muggles if you may, but it is their understanding of numbers which defines the foundations of wand-crafting. Most of the magical world's master wand-makers – be they human, dwarf, or goblin – are surprisingly adamant in applying Muggle mathematics to produce their finest works. And of course, we can even see the influence of Muggle mathematics in magical architecture, since the primary architects of Hogwarts were Squibs who had been trained by Muggles. In fact, the long-standing puzzle of the castle's shifting staircases is rumoured to have been based on their solution to one of arithmancy's most complex concepts, which a Muggle named Fermat formalized into a mathematical theorem. Truly, there is something magical about numbers, and that's without even considering the realm of the imaginary ones."
Quote by Heron Crawley, numerologist and author of 'Bombastic Numbers and their Magical Applications' and 'The Art of Wands'.
"As far as primitive magic is concerned, we must really ask ourselves: what is magic? Modern magicologists, whose training encompasses Muggle sciences in addition to magical theory, seem to agree that magic can be defined as any existing forces which defy the laws of Muggle science, and which are only partially quantifiable by means of arithmancy, numerology, and runes. Perhaps due to this consensus, we can say that for the first time in documented history, Muggle knowledge is being acknowledged and respected by the magical academic committee. Furthermore, this has allowed several unexpected areas of study to be pioneered in the field of magical theory; I believe that even as I speak to you now, research is being conducted into the magical nature of, among other things the orgasm. The orgasm!"
Quoted by Professor Emeritus Jules Wormwood, in a special edition of 'Transfiguration Today', circa 1869.
The year was 1933.
Diagon Alley was quiet, eerily so. So was Knockturn alley, for the matter, but that was to be expected of the armpit of magical England.
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardary, however, was not silent.
On the tenth of August, 1932, just three days after the Hogwarts Symphony Orchestra had played its last performance – none other than Requiem – Gellert Grindelwald had finally taken Hogwarts. The First Battle of Hogwarts had been an obscenely bloody affair, and it was estimated that nearly three-quarters of the school's residents had gone down fighting to defend the school. Grindelwald's forces were reduced to a skeleton crew by the time the battle was over, but he nonetheless managed to secure the school in his grip.
With no one left within the school capable of standing in his way, Grindelwald had set out to purge the school of any Muggle influences.
Muggle-borns and half-bloods were meticulously rooted out, tortured, and put to death by means of public executions that made headlines even in the magical Middle East. The library was ransacked for all books whose authors had traces of Muggle blood in the lineage, and said manuscripts unceremoniously burned or used as toilet paper. Exceptions were made, of course, for the works of a few notable Squibs, one of them named Josef Mengele, who would later rise to prominence in the Muggle world for his experiments on humans.
Needless to say, the Hogwarts Quidditch team and orchestra weren't spared. The members of those two student organisations were predominantly Squibs – not much magical talent was needed for someone to fly a broom or play an instrument, after all – and so their numbers were drastically reduced, even after considering the death toll of the terrific battle which took place in Hogwarts.
The first week of winter during Grindelwald's occupation of Hogwarts saw the school's collection of Muggle- and Squib-made brooms being chopped up for firewood. The school's harpsichords and pianos were next, and it was then that the first internal resistance to Grindelwald's occupation of the school was observed.
Few were surprised, really, to see that it was the seven remaining musicians in the school who initiated it.
Lucille Quincey, former concertmaster of the school orchestra and survivor of the First Battle of Hogwarts, never did reveal where she had hidden the orchestra's surviving instruments even when Grindelwald himself transfigured all thirty two of her teeth into miniature sea urchins, one by one. He was equally frustrated by her six colleagues, whose fates were equally as gruesome and whose only answers to his furious interrogation had been unintelligible screams of agony.
Even Grindelwald's wand-hand man, Eduardo Bielchowsky, would later confess that the trombone which went on display in the Great Hall after that had unnerved him; the remnants of its owner were literally packed within the instrument's brass piping.
"Requiem was, is, and ever will be the late Maestro Roth's finest composition, his magnum opus. By means of Pensieve memories, we have gotten hints that the sheer complexity of the piece, the layers of music, and the virtuosity required for literally the entirely orchestra… it hardly surprises me that till this day, we have yet to see a repeat performance of the piece – aside from respect for Maestro Roth, magical Europe's musical community has yet to fully recover from Grindelwald's butchery.
And then there's the simple fact that Grindelwald had the score for Requiem destroyed. Some say he made Roth swallow the paper before he killed him, but really, no one knows what happened to it.
I do wonder, though… just where did the students hide those instruments? Twenty two violins, an entire percussion section's worth of instruments, several harps, and practically the entire wind section wouldn't be easy to hide."
Maestro Arturo Szell, resident conductor and musical director of the Beauxbatons Choir.
The year was 1938.
Grindelwald barely managed to flee Hogwarts with his life after a united assault by the European and Asian magical governments all but shook the very foundations of the school. And so began a vicious game a cat-and-mouse that quite literally spanned three continents, and which inadvertently led to what the Muggles called the Second World War.
It was during the hunt for Gellert Grindelwald that his former peer and ally, Albus Dumbledore, finally stepped up to the challenge of tracking down and destroying the most destructive Dark wizard the world had seen since Morbedes the Devourer.
"To remember Grindelwald's victims, I am proud to present to you, my friends, the world's finest racing brooms. We all know how Grindelwald set back the clock on the art of broom-crafting by several decades by enjoying a warm hearth and putting our master craftsmen to death, and so this new series is further proof that the light shall always triumph over the dark. After much deliberation, we have decided to name this broom series after storm clouds, to remind us of the value of perseverance in the face of adversity. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, the Nimbus racing broom."
Excerpt from a speech by Alto Wright-Hart, owner of Comet Broomsticks, at the launch of the Nimbus racing broom series.
The year was 1945.
He had fled to Nurmengard, where he gathered his remaining forces and prepared for a siege. Albus Dumbledore, by then a teacher of transfiguration at Hogwarts, had followed him there, blown through his defenses like a cyclone, and the greatest battle of the century had begun.
Grindelwald would, in later years, remark that it was ironic, really: the curse which Dumbledore had used to defeat him, the Time-Looping curse, had been created by a Muggle-born spell-crafter.
By the time Harry Potter attended Hogwarts, few remembered just why Hogwarts had so many empty classrooms to begin with. Fewer still wondered just why the Quidditch pitch somehow had perfect acoustics, courtesy of several charms interwoven with the standard enchantments which prevented the Snitch from leaving the pitch's boundaries.
Almost no one save perhaps Hermione Granger, Terry Boot, and Michael Corner wondered where the remaining instruments of the Hogwarts Symphony Orchestra were hidden.
Nobody ever wondered why the Room of Requirement's entrance was hidden near the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy attempting to teach trolls ballet, of all the tapestries in the castle.
The Room never could be reopened after Vincent Crabbe's Fiendfyre gutted it, but sometimes, students passing by the sealed doors would hear music faintly echoing in the hallways.
Strangely enough, the echoing music was always the same: a single oboe crying out, followed by rumbling bassoons that faded into silence.
END