The melody still refuses to come out the way that it is supposed to, though I've been crafting it for weeks. The haunting bits are too haunting, the sentimental bits too sentimental, and the high notes too piercing. It is not the waltz that it is supposed to be, and by the way that it sounds, I should probably start from scratch again.
(It is a labour of love, this waltz-without-a-name, an agonising process. Composing has not come this difficult in decades.)
Everything is off, wrong, not telling the story that it needs to, not fitting into the correct tempo or rhythm. Changing notes isn't getting me anywhere, makes me feel like a beginner again. The whole composition thus far seems to have a personal grievance against its intended usage. (First dances at weddings are supposed to be sentimental affairs, not filled with piercing, haunting agony that consumes the lighter pieces, half-burying the slurs, losing the flow in a jarring rhythm. It isn't supposed to border on torture and desperation. So why does it continue to?)
I stop, swallow a mouthful of scotch, the fumes irrigating these thoughts from my mind. Start again. Stop. Repeat. I will be drunk by the end of this night if the notes continue their refusal to coagulate and align.
(There remains ten days until the wedding. This had better come together soon. I don't have time for these circles being run in my brain.)
I play it again, allowing the notes to change themselves. It is closer to an elegy, than a waltz. I need a nocturne more than a coda, but the nocturne refuses to come, and the coda is final. (A wedding is final – or supposed to be – until death tears it asunder, cue the elegy. Death is the coda, the elegy a new piece entirely. A wedding piece has no right be a requiem.)
I lay down the violin and bow, finish the scotch, and begin writing again.
Requiem for a waltz, indeed.