Preludes to Nothing
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This marks my first contribution to aph_rarexchange, and also my first time writing from Austria's POV in a story that's not AHEW.
Oh god, it is SO MUCH FUN. And there is Debussy nerdery contained herein.
Title: Preludes to Nothing
Author: Mithrigil
Fandom: Axis Powers Hetalia
Characters: Austria, France, Hungary.
Original prompt: France tries and fails to woo Austria using his usual methods. After a couple more rebuffs, he decides to try music. And it works. Exceptionally well.
Words: 2200
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Music nerdery.
Summary: “This isn’t in a key.”
Preludes to Nothing
2 March, A.D. 1910
“God damn that Schoenberg!”
Beside him, Hungary groans. “Honey, I was almost asleep.”
Austria shuts his eyes, takes a deep breath-no, two, the second one is entirely necessary-and apologizes. “I can’t stop hearing it.”
“You’d hear it less if you let yourself sleep,” she says pointedly, turning over and ducking under the blankets to face him, kiss his thigh-and then bat him on the knee, a little hard.
Austria sighs out all of that deep breath he just took in. “It’s a nuisance, he’s a nuisance. Why can’t he just paint his awful self portraits and leave music alone?”
“Because things like you exist to tell him he shouldn’t write it, and most artists don’t like doing what they should do.”
“Mozart did.”
“Mozart’s dead in a ditch, honey. And no, he didn’t.”
“But he didn’t write noise.” Austria leans his head back against the headboard, stares at the canopy.
“Act Two Finale of Figaro,” Hungary corrects.
“That wasn’t noise.”
“You said it was. You told that Italian guy-”
“That was before I listened to it. And don’t say I haven’t listened to Schoenberg’s new ‘Five Orchestra Pieces’, because I have, as well as most of the rest of his drivel, and yes, it is noise, and that’s what’s keeping me up.”
“Honey, you’re being melodramatic.”
“Haven’t you ever had something on your mind that kept you up?”
“Well, yeah, but it’s usually something like war.”
“This means war!” Austria doesn’t whack the headboard, but that’s only because the gesture goes too far to the left. “It’s war on the Masters. War on the institution.”
“Honey, if you don’t shut up I think I’ll have you sent to one.”
Sure, it’s an insult and a threat, but he way Hungary says it is just so damned cute that Austria has to laugh and lie down, shaking his head as it nestles closer to hers on the pillow. “Someone’s come a long way from being a conquered province.”
“Someone’s never been much of a conqueror, so I think we’re even,” she says, and gives him a better excuse for being unable to sleep.
Not that he’s able to sleep afterward, though. Damn that Schoenberg. It definitely does not sound like Summer Morning By a Lake, unless the lake is somewhere in Prussia and the morning is sometime during the Thirty Years War.
-
“Of course, Autriche, it has been so many years since we last offered ourselves in friendship,” France goes on, sipping his coffee and, for once, not looking like it’s only passable due to its unfortunate state of not having been brewed somewhere between Calais and Lorraine, “but by that same token, it is many years since we have been enemies! Surely you cannot be entirely averse to the possibility, not with your current administration.”
“My current administration is averse to most things involving you,” Austria corrects-and does not add, because there is no point, considering he is stricken with the French Disease.
France laughs, entirely too pleased with himself, and then pouts dramatically over his coffee. “Your people then, if not your Emperor. Come now, Autriche, we are Nations of culture! You cannot let such a pithy thing as politics stand in the way of entente.”
“And here I thought you weren’t as desperate for friends as you were four years ago.”
“That Russia, he does not return my phone calls.”
“And England?” Austria asks with a smirk.
“We are not so cordial as you may have heard. Rumors, I assure you.” France waves his hand. “I do not align myself with enemies.”
Austria rolls his eyes. “Only conquered lands.”
If Austria looks closely, he can see a little cluster of veins bulging out of France’s brow. Good. Maybe he’ll leave. “There is not that much conquering to be had, these days! The world,” he gestures, the coffee cup set down silently in its saucer (Austria is glad, at least, that someone else still manages to do that), “she is mapped! She is like a wife when one would prefer a lover.”
“Hungary sends her regards,” Austria says pointedly.
“A pity she could not join us.”
“Her Prime Minister is new.”
“Yes, yes, of course. Politics!” France takes up his cup again as swiftly and quietly as he put it down. “There are advantages to Democracy, Autriche, and the most fortunate of all is that the more humans I have in politics the less I have to be involved.”
Austria blinks. “Didn’t you just execute thousands of people for saying that?”
France waves his hand again-at least it’s the one without the coffee. “That was a hundred years ago.”
“This from someone who still starts wars with England over things that happened before the birth of Christ,” Austria scoffs.
At least that gives France some visible pause. “Angleterre is different,” he says, putting the coffee cup down for however many times and still managing to get his pinky under to silence it. Austria drinks his own coffee in a few more moments of blessed, all-too-rare victorious silence, and waits until he’s run out of things to drink before adding, “So, if you have no further business here-”
“Then let us turn to pleasure,” France says, rather than leave when he is obviously not welcome. He produces a folio from god only knows where and hands it across the table to Austria. “Another benefit of Democracy-that the artists can be subversive without being criminal. I thought you in particular might want to see-well, hear!-this.”
The folio is a compilation of piano preludes by a man named Claude Debussy. The name is vaguely familiar-given Austria’s involvement in his own music scene, which is rapidly becoming a noise scene, he hasn’t had time to hear everyone across Europe-and the gesture, on France’s part, can only mean the most ulterior of motives. But to Austria music is music, so long as it is being presented as such and not as senseless irreverent cacophony, and so Austria opens to the second prelude and squints.
“This is not in a key,” he says.
France laughs at him. “That is the point!”
“There is no point,” Austria corrects him, and frankly, this is the last straw where the debate is concerned-if atonality is spreading across Europe like a French Disease, Austria is done with it. “It’s not in a key. It doesn’t even have any leading tones-look at it, France, you know enough about music to see at least that. You can’t have tension without diatonicism! There’s no diatonicism! It’s all whole tones!”
“Except for the grace notes,” France says, smirking insufferably.
“Those don’t count!” It isn’t all right to disrespect music, but this isn’t music, so Austria doesn’t care about shoving the folio at France, open as it is. “My condolences to your past arts, France. Will you be holding any vigils to ease them into the next world?”
“You are being melodramatic,” France says.
“It’s a touchy subject.”
“I am aware.”
“And you’re what, using it as an excuse to be touchy?”
France pushes back his chair from the table and for a moment Austria is hopeful that he’ll take the hint and leave. “Autriche,” he says, with a certain sense of finality, “play it.”
“This isn’t 1800, France, you can’t tell me what to do.”
“And you cannot tell me what to do to music,” he counters, and Austria objects, or would. “Play it,” France says again, “if you can.”
“Do you think I’m England?” Austria groans. “That tactic doesn’t work on me. I’m not in a contest with you, I don’t have anything to prove.”
“Except that what you are holding is not music. I would like a practical demonstration. After all, if I do have an uncultured ear, it wants for your enlightenment.”
Austria swats him across the cheek with the folio.
But he does get up.
“Fine, fine.” He sighs. “You know where the nearest piano is, come on.”
The nearest piano is only in the next room-this is because the room they were just in has a clavichord instead. And the piano in question is not Austria’s favored but still a work of art and pride in its own right, an early Steingraeber grand, a gift from Germany upon his unification. What’s best, right now, is that the bench is quite certainly only big enough for one person, and so when Austria sits and sets the folio up open to the same second prelude as his example, France stands over him like a damned vulture.
Austria gives it a quick cursory sight-read before he touches the keys-even if it is noise, it is arranged as thoughtfully as any Bach construction, with thematic entrances in different registers as it goes on-it lays out the gesture at the start of falling thirds in the treble, a B-flat pedal in the extreme bass, a rising stepwise figure in the tenor which builds to chords in the fifteenth measure- “I’d like to point out that those-those clusters aren’t proper chords. There is a use for Augmented triads but the composer is not abiding by it.”
“Oh?”
Yes, France, oh. “An Augmented triad is meant as a secondary dominant to either open out to a minor chord or close into a major, usually the dominant, via passing tone. This composer-”
“Call him Claude, he insisted that even I do it.”
“This composer is just keeping his hand in the shape of an augmented triad and raising it by steps. It goes nowhere. The entire piece goes nowhere.”
“You still have not played it, Autriche.”
“I’m making sure I get it right the first time.” With another deep breath, he looks to the hocket section-that’s going to take some doing-and then the end. “You’ll forgive me if I’ve never played noise in my life.”
“I assure you, Claude has gone to great lengths to make it musical.”
“’Consonant’ does not mean ‘musical’. Just because he’s eliminated chromaticism entirely doesn’t make it-”
“Autriche. Play the piece.”
“I’d rather examine it theoretically to elucidate my argument.”
“If you are examining it theoretically, you are already treating it as music, no?”
Austria blanches. France’s hands come down on his shoulders.
“Play.”
Austria’s right hand is shaking, but it’s only falling thirds. He manages.
There goes the opening gesture, and its restatement-Austria’s hand is shaking less even if France is leaning increasingly on his back-and Austria expects the piece is supposed to go much faster than this but at least all the notes are there. Only six of them-using only six of them and no leading tones at all lends it this unearthly, aimless quality, which does, least, evoke the title, even if it’s not precisely musical.
“It’s odd,” he says, still playing, shaping those augmented chords and planing them up in the central register. “That something can be organized as music and still fail to abide by its precepts.”
“Go on,” France says, his mouth disturbingly close to Austria’s neck.
Austria’s hands are to otherwise occupied to throw him off. “If only the tonality were palatable, this would be quite lovely,” he says. “Though I suppose your composer doesn’t wish for it to be anything but ethereal. He’s not interested in creating music to listen to, he’s creating it to be analyzed. That much is obvious.” But the difficult hocket passage is coming up, so he has to concentrate if he wants the presentation to be flawless.
-The exchange is still not music. But it is absorbing.
Absorbing enough that he doesn’t notice France’s hand sliding down his chest until he’s almost reached his waistband.
Austria stands up and throws him off. “What happened to ‘play the piece’?”
“Forgive me, Autriche, it was just so entrancing.” Thrown off, he only comes nearer, backs Austria against the keyboard. “I had hoped you reach the key change.”
“How can there be a key change if it isn’t in a key?” Austria doesn’t mean to-no, he does mean to shout. “Shifting from one tuneless scale to another does not make it a key change! I don’t care if he’s been thinking of it as music, acknowledgement of pitch is required for it to be music and he’s not acknowledging pitch at all, he’s deliberately flouting it and while I don’t diminish the right of music to also be theoretical this is not music! It’s a game. He’s playing a game with the listener, and he’s playing a game with the performer and he’s playing a game with you, and your senseless games are contributing to the ruin of my vaunted institution-”
France spins him half-around, bends him over, and shoves a hand down his pants.
Oh, fine.
“Please, go on,” he says, licking the earpiece of Austria’s glasses.
Austria glowers. “If you make me come on the piano I will kill you.”
“Oh,” Hungary says cheerfully from the doorway. “Oh, hi, France! Don’t mind me, I’ll just be over here watching you two, okay?”
Austria settles himself against the Steingraber. “Hi, dear. How was the new Prime Minister?”
“Less politics, cher Autriche, and more music.”
“I’m telling you, it’s not music-”
-
---
-
Damn that Schoeberg.
Preludes, #2, Voiles.
-
.
This marks my first contribution to aph_rarexchange, and also my first time writing from Austria's POV in a story that's not AHEW.
Oh god, it is SO MUCH FUN. And there is Debussy nerdery contained herein.
Title: Preludes to Nothing
Author: Mithrigil
Fandom: Axis Powers Hetalia
Characters: Austria, France, Hungary.
Original prompt: France tries and fails to woo Austria using his usual methods. After a couple more rebuffs, he decides to try music. And it works. Exceptionally well.
Words: 2200
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Music nerdery.
Summary: “This isn’t in a key.”
Preludes to Nothing
2 March, A.D. 1910
“God damn that Schoenberg!”
Beside him, Hungary groans. “Honey, I was almost asleep.”
Austria shuts his eyes, takes a deep breath-no, two, the second one is entirely necessary-and apologizes. “I can’t stop hearing it.”
“You’d hear it less if you let yourself sleep,” she says pointedly, turning over and ducking under the blankets to face him, kiss his thigh-and then bat him on the knee, a little hard.
Austria sighs out all of that deep breath he just took in. “It’s a nuisance, he’s a nuisance. Why can’t he just paint his awful self portraits and leave music alone?”
“Because things like you exist to tell him he shouldn’t write it, and most artists don’t like doing what they should do.”
“Mozart did.”
“Mozart’s dead in a ditch, honey. And no, he didn’t.”
“But he didn’t write noise.” Austria leans his head back against the headboard, stares at the canopy.
“Act Two Finale of Figaro,” Hungary corrects.
“That wasn’t noise.”
“You said it was. You told that Italian guy-”
“That was before I listened to it. And don’t say I haven’t listened to Schoenberg’s new ‘Five Orchestra Pieces’, because I have, as well as most of the rest of his drivel, and yes, it is noise, and that’s what’s keeping me up.”
“Honey, you’re being melodramatic.”
“Haven’t you ever had something on your mind that kept you up?”
“Well, yeah, but it’s usually something like war.”
“This means war!” Austria doesn’t whack the headboard, but that’s only because the gesture goes too far to the left. “It’s war on the Masters. War on the institution.”
“Honey, if you don’t shut up I think I’ll have you sent to one.”
Sure, it’s an insult and a threat, but he way Hungary says it is just so damned cute that Austria has to laugh and lie down, shaking his head as it nestles closer to hers on the pillow. “Someone’s come a long way from being a conquered province.”
“Someone’s never been much of a conqueror, so I think we’re even,” she says, and gives him a better excuse for being unable to sleep.
Not that he’s able to sleep afterward, though. Damn that Schoenberg. It definitely does not sound like Summer Morning By a Lake, unless the lake is somewhere in Prussia and the morning is sometime during the Thirty Years War.
-
“Of course, Autriche, it has been so many years since we last offered ourselves in friendship,” France goes on, sipping his coffee and, for once, not looking like it’s only passable due to its unfortunate state of not having been brewed somewhere between Calais and Lorraine, “but by that same token, it is many years since we have been enemies! Surely you cannot be entirely averse to the possibility, not with your current administration.”
“My current administration is averse to most things involving you,” Austria corrects-and does not add, because there is no point, considering he is stricken with the French Disease.
France laughs, entirely too pleased with himself, and then pouts dramatically over his coffee. “Your people then, if not your Emperor. Come now, Autriche, we are Nations of culture! You cannot let such a pithy thing as politics stand in the way of entente.”
“And here I thought you weren’t as desperate for friends as you were four years ago.”
“That Russia, he does not return my phone calls.”
“And England?” Austria asks with a smirk.
“We are not so cordial as you may have heard. Rumors, I assure you.” France waves his hand. “I do not align myself with enemies.”
Austria rolls his eyes. “Only conquered lands.”
If Austria looks closely, he can see a little cluster of veins bulging out of France’s brow. Good. Maybe he’ll leave. “There is not that much conquering to be had, these days! The world,” he gestures, the coffee cup set down silently in its saucer (Austria is glad, at least, that someone else still manages to do that), “she is mapped! She is like a wife when one would prefer a lover.”
“Hungary sends her regards,” Austria says pointedly.
“A pity she could not join us.”
“Her Prime Minister is new.”
“Yes, yes, of course. Politics!” France takes up his cup again as swiftly and quietly as he put it down. “There are advantages to Democracy, Autriche, and the most fortunate of all is that the more humans I have in politics the less I have to be involved.”
Austria blinks. “Didn’t you just execute thousands of people for saying that?”
France waves his hand again-at least it’s the one without the coffee. “That was a hundred years ago.”
“This from someone who still starts wars with England over things that happened before the birth of Christ,” Austria scoffs.
At least that gives France some visible pause. “Angleterre is different,” he says, putting the coffee cup down for however many times and still managing to get his pinky under to silence it. Austria drinks his own coffee in a few more moments of blessed, all-too-rare victorious silence, and waits until he’s run out of things to drink before adding, “So, if you have no further business here-”
“Then let us turn to pleasure,” France says, rather than leave when he is obviously not welcome. He produces a folio from god only knows where and hands it across the table to Austria. “Another benefit of Democracy-that the artists can be subversive without being criminal. I thought you in particular might want to see-well, hear!-this.”
The folio is a compilation of piano preludes by a man named Claude Debussy. The name is vaguely familiar-given Austria’s involvement in his own music scene, which is rapidly becoming a noise scene, he hasn’t had time to hear everyone across Europe-and the gesture, on France’s part, can only mean the most ulterior of motives. But to Austria music is music, so long as it is being presented as such and not as senseless irreverent cacophony, and so Austria opens to the second prelude and squints.
“This is not in a key,” he says.
France laughs at him. “That is the point!”
“There is no point,” Austria corrects him, and frankly, this is the last straw where the debate is concerned-if atonality is spreading across Europe like a French Disease, Austria is done with it. “It’s not in a key. It doesn’t even have any leading tones-look at it, France, you know enough about music to see at least that. You can’t have tension without diatonicism! There’s no diatonicism! It’s all whole tones!”
“Except for the grace notes,” France says, smirking insufferably.
“Those don’t count!” It isn’t all right to disrespect music, but this isn’t music, so Austria doesn’t care about shoving the folio at France, open as it is. “My condolences to your past arts, France. Will you be holding any vigils to ease them into the next world?”
“You are being melodramatic,” France says.
“It’s a touchy subject.”
“I am aware.”
“And you’re what, using it as an excuse to be touchy?”
France pushes back his chair from the table and for a moment Austria is hopeful that he’ll take the hint and leave. “Autriche,” he says, with a certain sense of finality, “play it.”
“This isn’t 1800, France, you can’t tell me what to do.”
“And you cannot tell me what to do to music,” he counters, and Austria objects, or would. “Play it,” France says again, “if you can.”
“Do you think I’m England?” Austria groans. “That tactic doesn’t work on me. I’m not in a contest with you, I don’t have anything to prove.”
“Except that what you are holding is not music. I would like a practical demonstration. After all, if I do have an uncultured ear, it wants for your enlightenment.”
Austria swats him across the cheek with the folio.
But he does get up.
“Fine, fine.” He sighs. “You know where the nearest piano is, come on.”
The nearest piano is only in the next room-this is because the room they were just in has a clavichord instead. And the piano in question is not Austria’s favored but still a work of art and pride in its own right, an early Steingraeber grand, a gift from Germany upon his unification. What’s best, right now, is that the bench is quite certainly only big enough for one person, and so when Austria sits and sets the folio up open to the same second prelude as his example, France stands over him like a damned vulture.
Austria gives it a quick cursory sight-read before he touches the keys-even if it is noise, it is arranged as thoughtfully as any Bach construction, with thematic entrances in different registers as it goes on-it lays out the gesture at the start of falling thirds in the treble, a B-flat pedal in the extreme bass, a rising stepwise figure in the tenor which builds to chords in the fifteenth measure- “I’d like to point out that those-those clusters aren’t proper chords. There is a use for Augmented triads but the composer is not abiding by it.”
“Oh?”
Yes, France, oh. “An Augmented triad is meant as a secondary dominant to either open out to a minor chord or close into a major, usually the dominant, via passing tone. This composer-”
“Call him Claude, he insisted that even I do it.”
“This composer is just keeping his hand in the shape of an augmented triad and raising it by steps. It goes nowhere. The entire piece goes nowhere.”
“You still have not played it, Autriche.”
“I’m making sure I get it right the first time.” With another deep breath, he looks to the hocket section-that’s going to take some doing-and then the end. “You’ll forgive me if I’ve never played noise in my life.”
“I assure you, Claude has gone to great lengths to make it musical.”
“’Consonant’ does not mean ‘musical’. Just because he’s eliminated chromaticism entirely doesn’t make it-”
“Autriche. Play the piece.”
“I’d rather examine it theoretically to elucidate my argument.”
“If you are examining it theoretically, you are already treating it as music, no?”
Austria blanches. France’s hands come down on his shoulders.
“Play.”
Austria’s right hand is shaking, but it’s only falling thirds. He manages.
There goes the opening gesture, and its restatement-Austria’s hand is shaking less even if France is leaning increasingly on his back-and Austria expects the piece is supposed to go much faster than this but at least all the notes are there. Only six of them-using only six of them and no leading tones at all lends it this unearthly, aimless quality, which does, least, evoke the title, even if it’s not precisely musical.
“It’s odd,” he says, still playing, shaping those augmented chords and planing them up in the central register. “That something can be organized as music and still fail to abide by its precepts.”
“Go on,” France says, his mouth disturbingly close to Austria’s neck.
Austria’s hands are to otherwise occupied to throw him off. “If only the tonality were palatable, this would be quite lovely,” he says. “Though I suppose your composer doesn’t wish for it to be anything but ethereal. He’s not interested in creating music to listen to, he’s creating it to be analyzed. That much is obvious.” But the difficult hocket passage is coming up, so he has to concentrate if he wants the presentation to be flawless.
-The exchange is still not music. But it is absorbing.
Absorbing enough that he doesn’t notice France’s hand sliding down his chest until he’s almost reached his waistband.
Austria stands up and throws him off. “What happened to ‘play the piece’?”
“Forgive me, Autriche, it was just so entrancing.” Thrown off, he only comes nearer, backs Austria against the keyboard. “I had hoped you reach the key change.”
“How can there be a key change if it isn’t in a key?” Austria doesn’t mean to-no, he does mean to shout. “Shifting from one tuneless scale to another does not make it a key change! I don’t care if he’s been thinking of it as music, acknowledgement of pitch is required for it to be music and he’s not acknowledging pitch at all, he’s deliberately flouting it and while I don’t diminish the right of music to also be theoretical this is not music! It’s a game. He’s playing a game with the listener, and he’s playing a game with the performer and he’s playing a game with you, and your senseless games are contributing to the ruin of my vaunted institution-”
France spins him half-around, bends him over, and shoves a hand down his pants.
Oh, fine.
“Please, go on,” he says, licking the earpiece of Austria’s glasses.
Austria glowers. “If you make me come on the piano I will kill you.”
“Oh,” Hungary says cheerfully from the doorway. “Oh, hi, France! Don’t mind me, I’ll just be over here watching you two, okay?”
Austria settles himself against the Steingraber. “Hi, dear. How was the new Prime Minister?”
“Less politics, cher Autriche, and more music.”
“I’m telling you, it’s not music-”
-
---
-
Damn that Schoeberg.
Preludes, #2, Voiles.
-
.