"Ah!"

Ayla couldn't hold back the moan that burst out of her.

Not long ago, she'd been chosen as the youngest-ever guest performer with the Vienna Philharmonic in Austria.

She'd been hailed as a genius at the Vienna Conservatory, and now she was tasting a crushing sense of her own inadequacy.

Ayla, who had loved Beethoven.

She was witnessing Beethoven made flesh.

When an Asian man came up to the stage—the last thing she'd imagined—she'd been startled.

After she'd played, no pianist should have been able to take that stage.

She was the official pianist the city had invited for the Aix-en-Provence music festival.

To liven up the mood for the city, she'd played the piano according to the program.

Beethoven, whom Ayla had long adored.

Freely, from Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 8, the Pathétique, to No. 14, the Moonlight.

And then No. 21, the Waldstein, the one Ayla was most confident in—she'd played them all, sparing no passion.

She'd poured every bit of energy in her body into playing.

Blessed by a warm Provence afternoon, she'd thought of Beethoven and given it her best.

She'd been very satisfied herself.

Every note and every chord had been precise.

As Beethoven sonatas went, it lacked power, but she'd made up for it with technique.

Even she, though, hadn't dared touch Piano Sonata No. 23, the Appassionata.

Together with the Waldstein, the last piece Ayla had played, it represented Beethoven's middle period.

It was on another level of difficulty.

It had taken thirty-five years before the public could even play it.

Beethoven had been the leading pianist of his day, with a technique no one could match.

And Sonata No. 23, the Appassionata, was what that Beethoven wrote when he truly set his mind to it.

The enormous swings in volume as it broke form, and the passionate colors it painted in the mind, had earned it praise for rivaling the tone of an orchestra.

Sonata No. 23, said to have been dedicated to his friend and patron Count Franz von Brunsvik, was also a piece full of Beethoven's lava-hot passion of…