AN: a recording of Schumann's Anfangs wollt ich fast verzagen, Op. 24 No. 8, can be found at the following link; the English translation is mentioned in the story. You have to type the word "youtube" in, for whatever reason. I hope I'm not running afoul of any rules here; just trying to make it so people can actually hear the music (which is about 250 years old, give or take, and definitely not under copyright!)

.com/watch?v=yL-e8NrbazU

NEUN

Ein altes, schönes Lied

Several days later

"What are you looking at, Hermann?"

Hermann looked up from the sheet music he had been looking over while Kopa, tucked cozily under the blanket Hermann had "borrowed" from the 747, had been sleeping on a makeshift mattress of clothing. He had improved, albeit very slightly, but to Hermann, progress was progress. Things were far from "out of the woods" at any rate; Hermann still had to keep a constant vigil over his patient, and Kopa needed a strong painkiller injected twice a day just to be able to function. It was a procedure for which both parties shared an intense dislike; Hermann had once been the recipient of the same exact anesthetic when he had broken his leg, and since that time he had probably used it on his patients dozens of times. He knew, based on his own unenviable experiences, that it took a long time to inject and that it burned going in, but at least the results were well worth the initial discomfort.

Back home, Hermann had always worked efficiently, but had never possessed what could be called a patient and caring bedside manner. His focus was, of course, to make his patients well, but he often carried out the necessary procedures while looking at the clock and planning out his afternoon as opposed to paying more attention to the finer, more personal aspects of practical medicine. He was glad that his experiences with Kopa had made him change his outlook. Waiting for a few moments, even the better part of an hour at first, to reassure Kopa that he was going to make the shots hurt as little as possible, to instruct him to focus on the colors of the rocks in the wall or the sound of the birds singing outside, or to spend a few minutes simply stroking him on the head before proceeding was now something he considered just as important as carrying out the procedure itself. Of course, try as he might, Hermann could not take away the anxiety or the element of fear to what he was doing. Even though he did his best to put all matters at ease, Kopa would still whimper and startle at the slightest touch when he thought himself about to feel that awful burning sensation. Hermann, knowing exactly what being on the shot's receiving end felt like, hated seeing his young charge in such a state and tried to come up with some remedial measures—once, for example, he had promised Kopa that if he held still and kept calm, he would personally run (or hobble, to be exact) headlong into the rock wall to provide a bit of lighthearted Schadenfreude, an undertaking that ended rather predictably with a thud, a nasty cut to the hand, German swear words, and Markos laughing hysterically on the floor—but in the end, it mostly boiled down to patience on his part. "I promise I'll make it as fast as I can," he would say as Kopa closed his eyes tightly and squeezed Hermann's free hand with his good front paw. "It'll be finished in just a moment, and then once the medicine starts working, you'll feel a lot better." It was something he needed to hear himself as much as Kopa did.

Kopa spent most of the day and night resting, on direction from just about everybody who came in to see him, so it was rather to Hermann's surprise that he should now be awake and feeling well enough to ask about what he was reading. "This?" he asked, pointing to the sheets of paper. "It's music, just a few songs by Robert Schumann. When I'm not at the hospital, I practice these...I like to think it keeps me from going completely crazy." Kopa looked at Hermann, who was busy penciling in dynamics and intervals, with confusion. He didn't understand how a song, previously known to him only as something to be heard and passed down, could possibly be written down on a page.

"I don't get it, how do you look at music? And who's this 'Robert Schumann', do you know him?" This question was as confusing to Hermann as written sheet music was to Kopa. Hermann had grown up dreaming of being a Lieder singer, and everyone he knew in addition to himself could read music without a hint of difficulty. And to not know the name Robert Schumann—for him, it was comparable to not knowing what the sun was called, or the colors of the national flag. But then he realized that to someone who had never seen even the most basic song written down in musical notation, a full score for piano and baritone would be quite strange-looking and foreign indeed.

Hermann walked over to where Kopa was lying and showed him the paper in question, which was dotted with all kinds of unfamiliar symbols and words. "Have you ever seen this before?" he asked.

"No," Kopa replied, "what is it?"

"This is a score," Hermann explained. "It's what music looks like when it's written down on paper." Kopa could only raise an eyebrow, causing Hermann to rethink his approach.

"Think of it this way…I can say my name out loud, or write it in letters, correct?" Hermann picked up a stick and scribbled 'H-E-R-M-A-N-N' in the dirt. "And I can do the same thing with your name," he continued, writing out 'K-O-P-A' with the same stick. "Those letters tell you what sounds to make with your voice, which in turn gives you words and sentences. With me so far?" Kopa nodded.

"OK, so what if, instead of a word, I wanted to write out the sounds that make a song? In that case, we just change the symbols to stand for musical pitches instead of syllables." Hermann drew five lines and a crude G clef next to where he had written his name, and then hummed a simple arpeggio. "If I wanted to write those sounds down, I couldn't do it with regular letters; those wouldn't tell me how high or low to sing. But I can do it like this." He carefully drew in the tonic note, followed by the third, the fifth, and finally the octave.

Kopa looked at the dots on the floor, and then asked, "So you're saying, those things tell you what to sing?"

"Yes," Hermann replied, "and the words to the song go underneath the notes. It takes some practice to be able to read everything and know what it all means, but once you get the basics down, it's fairly easy from there."

"It doesn't look easy to me…you must be really good if you can read all this," Kopa said, now looking over at Hermann's songbook filled with annotations, meter changes, and dynamic markings in German. Hermann could read all of them without even having to think about it—he could see every cadence, key change, and ornament on the page and know exactly what to do—but to Kopa, there was simply too much to comprehend all at once: not just black dots, but white dots, dots with little connected tails on them running all up and down the page, ms and fs and mfs and an sfz …and that was only the first eight measures or so. "So what is this one about?" Kopa asked, trying to find something recognizable.

"Actually, this piece is just one of sixteen separate songs in a cycle; we call it a Liederkreis," said Hermann. "It's a story in music…this one in particular is about a young man who falls deeply in love with a beautiful woman."

"And do they get married and have lots of kids?"

"No, actually, in this story she leaves him, and he almost goes insane because of it. At the very end, he's able to recover and move on, but for a while, he's in pretty bad shape. In one song, he's seeing dead people in their graves, and then he starts thinking that the flowers in his garden have started talking with him."

Kopa laughed at the idea of talking plants, even more so when he imagined them speaking in a heavy accent such as Hermann's. "I wish I knew how to read it myself," he said. "What did you say it was called?"

"I didn't" said Hermann, now very much envisioning himself a professor of all things musical. "It's called Dichterliebe; it means 'A Poet's Love'. But there's much more to good singing than knowing the notes on the page, you know; you have to feel what the composer felt when he wrote everything down. Every note and word in music has a message; a good singer can stay on key, but a Meistersinger can tell the whole story as if it all happened to him."

"A Meister-what?" asked Kopa.

Meistersinger…it means "master singer", someone who has been studying music for his whole life. Hermann flipped through the score to another song cycle, and found a short piece of only about twenty bars. Kopa stared at the page, which was mostly black circles with words underneath them. "You know how to sing this?" he asked.

"Actually, yes; it's been a long time since I sang this song, but it was one of the first I ever learned."

"Is it in Germanic?"

"German, and yes, it is…Robert Schumann wrote his songs in German. It goes like this." Hermann Wolfgang Sterlitz stood up, figured out the starting pitch, and for the first time in his life, sang for an audience:

Anfangs wollt ich fast verzagen

Und ich glaubt ich trüg es nie,

Und ich hab es doch getragen,

Aber fragt mich nur nicht, wie?

Kopa was very much impressed. "Wow, you really are good! The song was kind of short, though."

"That's the idea," replied Hermann. "It doesn't need anything else."

"What does it mean?" asked Kopa. "It sounds kind of sad, but not like crying sad, more like…like a strong kind of sad. I mean, he's upset, but in the end he's going to get through it." Even though Kopa did not understand the German, the music had all but translated it for him. The slow yet stately tempo, the momentary change from minor to major and back near the end; in truth, the words were rather unimportant. Hermann was rather surprised with how well Kopa had deciphered the little song's message.

"Yes, that's actually exactly what it means," he said. "There is a translation in here somewhere"—he ruffled through the pages to the end of the book, where the German poetry sat neatly opposite an English equivalent. "Found it! It says,

'At first I almost despaired,
And I thought I would never be able to bear it;
Yet even so, I have borne it –

But do not ask me how.'"

"That sounds familiar," said Kopa, thinking of how his father had once come back from exile to reclaim what had rightfully been his. "It sounds like my dad."

"Nein, mein Kind, it sounds like you," Hermann replied with a smile. "It is you. Herr Schumann would be proud, that I can say with certainty."