Chapter 2
Erik's Fame
"The Opera Ghost?" Lily said out loud, still unaware that no one was around. She saw that the stack of paper from the envelope was almost half an inch thick, and she fought with herself on whether to read it tonight or save it for morning. She knew this had to be something good, so she sat down at the dining room table and turned on the little light in the middle of it. It read:
I realize that this must seem like an odd way to communicate, and let me apologize at once for that. As I have said, I am the Opera Ghost. No doubt that you have heard of me before, I seemed to have made quite the uproar at a certain opera house in Paris in the late 1800's. Now you might wonder why in the world I ended up in New York, but the beginning is the best place to start (as I have repeatedly said) so let's begin.
My life started in the 1850's, in a small little town in Persia. I have looked on recent maps and found that it no longer is there, and was probably lost to another city. There was the start of my bad beginnings.
From the age of birth to 9, I had quite a normal life. I started school at the age of 7, and showed amazing abilities in math, music, and foreign languages, the foremost being French and German. My instrument forte was the violin, but then I discovered the piano. I begged my mother and father to get my one for months, until they finally yielded. For the first four days of owning the piano I did not eat, nor sleep. It was to be the first of many times that I would be nourished by music alone.
I composed thirty-one songs in those four days, and fourteen of them for a musical I decided to write. After my stint with the piano, I moved on to the violin. I worked at all the music for my lessons that I had neglected over the past four days. Spurred by my newfound talent to write music, I tried my hand at writing for the violin. For that I was able to compose fifty-nine songs. In all fairness, the songs for the piano were at shortest three minutes long. The songs for my violin were all short, minute long Gavottes.
My mother and father were astonished at my ability. They had never heard of such talent at such a young age. For the next week I gave concerts at the market, and collected a great amount of donations, of which my father took half, and left the rest for me, which I thought was fair. One day at the market I attracted a larger crowd then usual. It just so happened that in the crowd was a servant of the prince that ruled over our village and surrounding areas, and was astonished to hear a child not yet aged ten who played as well as any virtuoso.
He apparently rushed to the prince and told him of this spectacle. The prince was incredulous and demanded to go to hear me play. The next day he arrived at my house and asked me if I would give him a private concert in four days time. I naturally accepted, and he was overjoyed.
After he left, I started writing a violin sonata for him, to be premiered at his special concert. I worked on that piece for two days straight, and it turned out to be sixteen minutes in length, and required all my skill of my young fingers.
At the end of this period of two weeks, I was exhausted, and decided to rest before the concert, so that's what I did. The day before the concert was spent sleeping, for I had gotten almost none over the past weeks. I would occasionally eat, and then sleep for periods of two hours.
When I awoke on time, I found nobody in the house. I deduced that my mother must have needed something for her sewing, and looked for something to eat. That was when my life was changed forever more.