Chapter 1: The Symphony

The first violinist was only ever so slightly slouched over in her chair when the found her. But for the rest of her, it was as though she was still awaiting her cue. Her hands were folded over in her lap. Her bow clutched lightly, between the thumb and forefinger. And if you drew an imaginary line from the pupils of her still open eyes to her notes, they wiould fix exactly on the last note of the page that awaited dog-eared turning.
The only thing in fact, that gave it away, was that unlike all the other violinists, she had not in fact turned the page, and the Verdi had ended for her, on the penultimate page of La Traviata, even as Alfredo held ioletta in his arms and begged her forgiveness.
"I hope I never go like that," shuddered golden-bobbed Julia, flautist, later. "It would haunt me -- those last few hanging notes," and a shiver ran down her flute-like spine, her mouth as always, slightly ajar.
The other orchestra members had not lookes directly at her when they waited for her to stand first and take the bow. They had at first thought it was the customary coyness that it is proper for a first violinist to show when the calls for encore began. "Of course, these days who even knows hat is customary anymore, eh?" Gusieppe asked, walking around between the porp chairs worriedly. "They encore fools like Amandeglio and not twice but thrice! We must not take it as a complement when they encore us," he wagged his finger at the lost crowd of faces before him, before turning in dramatic pause to the slouched over figure that now awaited medical confirmation, "I thought that, like me, she had decided she had had enough," he said, his voice now barely above a whisper.
Anthony, bright eyed from New York, cut through the melodrama in his thick country cut southern accent, "What a load of rubbish! The poor girl's had a stroke, and it's terrible, just terrible, that none of us noticed a note going wrong. What does that have to say for us as an orchestra? Tell me that? And what's worse - what does that say of the maestro, eh?"
"Surely in America, the maestrois not sued for the death of the first violinist too," laughed a sneeringly sophiosticatedly Parisian Victoria, "After all, you do, do you not, like to put blame, or you as a nation do not know what to do with your free time," she scoffed.