Wayward Notes (Austria)
It was a bright, sunny Saturday morning. Austria had opened the windows to his music room wide, letting in some pleasant rays of spring sun, and was tuning his violin. He had decided to play Tzigane for this year's anniversary of his wedding with Hungary on the 8th of June because Ravel's piece was reminiscent of Hungarian folk music. Since it was a complex composition, he intended to practice it a few times. In order to do so, he only needed to place the notes onto his music stand and…
But where were they? Austria could have sworn he had placed them right on top of the closed lid of his piano this morning. True, there was a pile of notes on the lid, but he saw at a glance that Tzigane wasn't among them.
Or did he? Austria suddenly wasn't that certain any more. After all, it had happened before that he had thought something had been moved when it had actually remained at the same place. He started to sift through the loose-leaf collection of pieces he had played during the past weeks, mumbling the names of the composers to himself in a low voice.
"…Brahms, Schubert, Beethoven, Beethoven, Smetana, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Rahmaninoff, Chopin, Chopin, Chopin, Bartók, Stravinsky, Telemann, Mozart, Mozart, Mozart, Liszt, Hindemith, Bach—oh! I was looking for that piece two days ago!—Lanner, Strauss, Strauss, Schönberg, Webern, Debussy, Lehár, Haydn, Haydn…"
In the end, he had looked through every single sheet of music in that pile. Still no Tsigane. With an irritated frown, Austria tapped on the translucent drawing paper that had rested on top of it. It made a rustling sound with every tap.
Wait a minute … drawing paper? Why is there drawing paper on top of that pile?
Then, Austria had a sudden revelation. He rushed to his kitchen and opened the oven door.
Bingo. There was his Tsigane.
Earlier this morning, he had intended to bake a Gugelhupf for coffee and cake with Hungary and Czechia on Sunday afternoon. Then, the telephone had rung. He had attempted to prepare the cake while listening to Germany who had called him in order to talk about some important EU business. When Germany hadn't stopped talking his ears off, he had postponed baking to the afternoon.
Austria pieced together that during that call, he had to have accidentally put the baking parchment—of course it was baking parchment, why would he still use drawing paper in the age of copying machines?—on top of the piano lid and put the notes in the oven instead. He sighed.
Thank goodness no one else found the notes in the oven, he thought. They would have mocked me for getting so easily distracted.
Notes
The rhapsodic piece Tsigane (1924) is considered one of the most demanding works for violin. French composer Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) actually wrote it for a Hungarian violinist, Jelly d'Arányi (1893-1966). Tsigane is a French term for "gypsy", but the title of Ravel's work doesn't refer to the Romani people (a dispersed, traditionally nomadic ethnic group that is originally from Northern India but lives mostly in Europe—please don't call them "gypsies", this term is derogatory). Instead, "gypsy style" was a term used at the time to describe a kind of musical exoticism that incorporated Eastern European/Hungarian folk tunes.