What Music Carries

The first opera I ever saw in my life was "La Traviata".

What if it's boring and I fall asleep?

That thought vanished the moment the violin music began to resonate. What a beautiful melody; even though the stage was so far away, it felt like it was playing right next to my ears!
The overture captured my heart, and I was captivated by the beauty of the arias and duets sung one after another on stage. I had been worried that having melodies attached to dialogue would feel unnatural, but that wasn't the case at all.
When a theme song is suddenly inserted into a climactic scene in a TV drama, it inevitably heightens the excitement, doesn't it? Sometimes there's even a line that really hits home right then.
I realized that opera simply combines that dialogue and background music into one.

One of my favorite parts in La Traviata is the aria sung by Violetta (a high-class courtesan) after she is confessed to by the young nobleman Alfredo.

She sings about how she wishes a very kind man would appear one day, wondering if perhaps that man is Alfredo, and thinking that with him, she might find the pain and delight of love (croce e delizia), the joy of loving and being loved.

But then she sings as if to shake off those thoughts, saying, "That's impossible! It's ridiculous! I will live for pleasure!"

Then, from afar, she hears Alfredo's voice singing"croce e delizia"with his voice. It starts around the 46-second mark.

You definitely end up remembering this. The words Alfredo used to confess his love, the fluttering of your own heart, and even his intense gaze, his breath, and his body heat all come rushing back (or is that just me?).

I remember feeling, while listening to this aria, that voices, words, and music are things that can evoke the scenes, various thoughts, and sensations of that time.

Every time I listen to this, I am moved by what a brilliant director Verdi was.

I was reminded of all this while reading this novel by Yagi-mail.

****************From here on, there are spoilers, so if you haven't read it yet, please do so first!****************

The surprise of how the opening in Palau connects to the end, and what particularly struck me, was the scene on the plane to Palau where Frank Sinatra's "Fly Me to the Moon" starts playing.

Fly me to the moon. And let me play among the stars.

With this song in the background, images of Matsumura-kun's profile on the plane to Palau, and overlapping with that, the events of the day he went to see the wind blowing on the moon, his confession, the kiss under the full moon, the walk home holding hands... all sorts of things came flooding back as images. Matsumura-kun's feeling of, "I hope that since then, we have been looking at the same moon," is also heartbreakingly conveyed. I can't help but imagine what's in his heart.
Yagi-san is amazing for including "Fly Me to the Moon" here.
For me, it's completely a La Traviata situation.

The moment this song played, everything came back to me, and tears flowed.Did you decide to include this song from the very beginning?

I am getting excited all by myself.
I apologize for this messy and poorly written review.

Yagi-mail-san, thank you for the wonderful novel.