Songs Without Words

It started in the middle of Alex’s ten-thousand-step playlist.

Instead of “God is a Dancer”, the rhythmic, fast-paced, electronic song in his queue, a gentle rainfall of left-hand quavers and cantabile right-hand melody interrupted the stream of beats and autotuned vocals. The album said “Mendelssohn - Lieder ohne Worte”, played by a classical pianist Alex had only vaguely heard of.

“What the hell is this?” he wondered.

As it happened, it was raining outside, and Alex was doing his ten thousand steps in his flat, up and down the corridor, around the kitchen with its recessed lighting and polished butcher board, checking his fitness watch every few minutes to see how far he’d come.

Thankfully the next track was Taylor Swift declaring they would never be together, so he soon forgot about the anomaly. Until that evening when he was checking out some old Deep Purple videos with a cold beer – and once more the Mendelssohn album popped up.

This time the piano was in some sort of trot or jig, sounding like a hunter’s horn. He clicked next on the playlist, but it was all Mendelssohn, and whatever he chose, the next piece was always that Venetian gondolier piece the girl had played on that film Once.

“Weird,” he thought, switching on Formula One. But though he had recorded the Bahrain Grand Prix in its entirety, instead of the whine of the cars vying against each other, he was faced with a still of a music score and a series of bubbling E major arpeggios coming over the surround sound speakers. Opus 38, no. 3.

God damn it, he didn’t even like Mendelssohn.

When his wife got home from work, he started telling her what had happened, but to her astonishment no words came out of his mouth, only beautiful, sublime piano notes.