Narrating Near-Death Experience

1 Overview and methodology

Released in 2007 for the video game console Xbox 360 (and, later, the PlayStation 3), the Japanese role-playing game Eternal Sonata constitutes a marked divergence from other games of its genre. As a genre of video games, a role-playing game (henceforth “RPG”) is one that places players in the perspective of a main character or characters following a pre-written narrative storyline within a well-defined in-game world. Usually, the in-game world is highly fictionalized, incorporating fantastical elements like magic or dragons (e.g. the Final Fantasy series) or set in a futuristic, science-fiction universe (e.g. the Mass Effect series). The core gameplay of a RPG varies between franchises, but almost always involves intricate combat systems governed by statistical parameters such as health, attack power, speed, magic capacity, and more. RPGs usually seek to immerse players in a compelling storyline filled with suspenseful and/or emotional events – distinguishing the RPG from other video game genres, such as sports simulation games, in which the gameplay itself is the primary value. RPG games developed in Japan – one of the world’s most influential centers for video game development – are called Japanese role-playing games (henceforth “JRPG”). The greatest distinguishing factor of a JRPG from other RPGs – apart from the obvious choice of primary language – is that a JRPG’s visual aesthetic tends to be influenced by the art style of other media of Japanese pop arts, such as manga and anime. In all these characteristics, Eternal Sonata is no exception to other video games of the JRPG genre. However, though Eternal Sonata is set in an imaginative fantasy world, it is intricately interwoven with historical events of the real world in a manner far rarer for JRPGs – based on this present author’s lifetime of experience with the JRPG genre. We will explore this below in Sections 2 and 3.

Another unique feature of Eternal Sonata is the prominent role played by music in its story, gameplay, and meaning. Though the musical score of a video game is often ancillary to questions of the work’s artistic meaning, on occasion it may serve as an interpretive key to resolving ambiguities raised by the game’s plot. This entails that ludomusicology – the study and interpretation of video game musical scores using methods common to music-theoretical study of concert music, film scores, and popular music – contributes vitally to the semiosis of video games as a holistic multimedia entity. Understanding a video game’s music may thus serve an equally productive role to analysis of its gameplay, narrative, and visual aesthetic in interpreting its artistic meaning. The present investigation will explore a particularly salient intersection of video games and concert music, proposing an interpretation of the narrative’s multiply-ambiguous ending based on analysis of its musical score. If my interpretation is aesthetically warranted, it will be an instance of music adding dimensions of meaning to a video game rather than simply reflecting the meaning already present within and gleaned from the game’s narrative and other aesthetic components.

A brief foreword on methodology: I will employ techniques and methods developed for the analysis and interpretation of concert music (also called “art music” or “classical music”). The burgeoning interest in interpreting the meaning of concert music is known – at least in this author’s context in the United States – as musical semiotics. These methodologies have been rigorously applied to concert music from across the centuries as well as to many examples of film music; however, application of these interpretive techniques to the hermeneutics of video game music remains in its infancy. While video game scores often follow their own stylistic conventions and thus are subject to different interpretive frameworks, the uniquely intertextual nature of Eternal Sonata – which weaves together originally composed music with the works of the nineteenth-century pianist Frédéric Chopin – legitimizes the application of these methods. As will be explored in Section 4, this intertextuality bears much semiotic potential for application in interpreting video game music.

2 Introduction

“Death is a reality that is far too real.”

– Frédéric François Chopin (Eternal Sonata)^[1]

I first encountered the music of Frédéric Chopin not through a piano recital or sheet music anthology, but by playing a video game. Ten years ago, video game developer and director Hiroya Hatsushiba created Eternal Sonata with a unique premise: The events of the game’s story take place entirely within Chopin’s dream, as the composer lay dying from tuberculosis in his Paris apartment. Hatsushiba explained his pedagogical intention for the video game in an interview with the video game journalism website GameSpot: “most of the people who know of Chopin think he is just some kind of great music composer without knowing any more about him. […] By creating a colorful fantasy world in Chopin’s dream, I was hoping that people would […] come to know how great Chopin’s music is” (Gamespot 2007). Hatsushiba’s statement applies primarily to his own context in Japan, but even in Europe and North America – more thoroughly steeped in the European classical music tradition – the details of Chopin’s life and music are less ubiquitously known in the modern day. As we shall see, Eternal Sonata familiarizes players not simply with Chopin’s music, but also with the events and themes of his life. The video game functions as pedagogy in addition to entertainment.

In the dream, Chopin’s influence as the originator of the world is palpable. Heavily stylized characters and locations are whimsically named after musical instruments and terms: Tuba, Viola, Allegretto, Rondo, Serenade – even, anachronistically, Salsa and Jazz. Motoi Sakuraba’s original score consists of orchestral instrumentation appropriate to Chopin’s time – devoid of the synthesizers, electric guitars, and drum sets that permeate his other scores. A majority of the story’s poignant or emotional cutscenes^[2] are scored by solo piano, drawing on Chopin’s reputation as “poet of the piano,” if not his style. The player can also seek out pianos hidden throughout the world’s towns and cities that play one of Chopin’s pieces in its entirety. However, nothing manifests this influence as completely as Chopin entering his own dream world as the playable, main protagonist.

3 Enter the dream: A thematic summary of Eternal Sonata

“Why was she destined to die? What crime could the girl have committed to deserve such a cruel fate?”

– Frédéric François Chopin (Eternal Sonata)

Most of Eternal Sonata’s themes^[3] are drawn from important biographical events in Chopin’s own life, forming a historical bedrock upon which the writers build the dream world’s original story. First, Chopin’s perceived identity as a Romantic consumptive artist marked him as “[occupying] the boundary between life and death” (Klein 2015: 114). Though he was doomed to premature death and oft avoided for fear of contagion, in Parisian society Chopin’s tuberculosis associated him with unique poetic insight, pallid physical beauty, and a reputation as an artistic visionary (Klein 2015: 112). The latter was reinforced by his frequent nightmares and hallucinations – documented in his “Stuttgart Diary” (Szulc 1998: 46–49) – and audiences’ interpreting his music as ethereal and otherworldly (Kallberg 1996: 63 as cited in Klein 2015: 114). In the dream world, the Romantic consumptive artist wields great magical power. Only the incurably, terminally ill can use magic, usually driving the user mad or transforming the user into a monster before death. Naturally, the playable Chopin is a magic user, consigning him to a grim fate in the dream world as well as the real world.

Another magic user is a second theme and the game’s other main character: Polka, a fourteen-year-old girl based on Chopin’s beloved younger sister, Emilia.^[4] From an early age, Emilia showed prodigious artistic talent, writing poems and a comedy stage play as gifts (FCI 2015). However, at age eleven she began showing symptoms of “recurrent coughing, breathlessness, weight loss, pneumonia, asthma, and recurrent hematemesis,” which took her life at age fourteen (Kubba and Young 1998: 210). Young Emilia’s death impacted Frederic deeply, especially as the same symptoms encroached on his own life. Even in the face of death, the “luminous and angelic” Emilia retained her kindheartedness, “accepting her fate with serenity” (FCI 2015). Likewise, Polka’s potent magic portends terminal illness, yet she seeks to spend her remaining time helping other people. Chopin’s dream-world relationship with his sister-surrogate drives the primary development of both characters throughout the game.

Upon entering the dream world, Chopin acts as an observer and playable character^[5] in the game’s original plot. Though the original story – of a ragtag group of young heroes rebelling against the cruel and corrupt tyrant Count Waltz – is far less compelling than the broader story involving Chopin, it comprises a third point of resonance with Chopin’s life. The rebel group “Andantino” parallels the November Uprising, which strove for independence in Warsaw, his home. As William Gibbons writes, “[b]y actively contributing to battle in his dream world, the metafictional Chopin engages with conflict in a direct way that the real composer never could” (Gibbons 2018: 130). The game frequently reinforces this connection, paralleling Chopin’s dream-world flight to the neighboring country of Baroque with his expatriate “exile” in Vienna and Paris, implying he sought to rally support for Polish independence in these cities just as he pleads for action from Baroque’s Prince Crescendo.

Finally, Eternal Sonata adopts a pedagogical role by featuring some of Chopin’s pieces in their entirety – performed by internationally acclaimed pianist Stanislav Bunin – foregrounded through strategically placed intercuts. In Eternal Sonata, these intercuts are three-to-eight-minute slideshows of still photographs and impressionistic paintings accompanied by text captions presenting biographical information from – and, at times, speculative interpretation of – Chopin’s life. Each intercut is paired with one of Chopin’s solo piano pieces, performed by Bunin, as the text captions explicate the historical conditions surrounding Chopin’s composition of the piece. This fulfills developer Hatsushiba’s stated pedagogical aim to familiarize players with Chopin’s music and life events. However, more is at stake in these intercuts than providing edifying biographical information; the intercuts also foreground the artistic meaning of the video game’s narrative. The intercuts punctuate the flow of the storyline, occurring near the beginning or end of each of the plot’s seven chapters. Not only do the intercuts’ captions relate Chopin’s music to events in his life, but they also parallel the themes explored in the dream world events of each chapter as shown below:

Gibbons points out that these intercuts comprise one of three distinct narrative levels: real, fictional, and metafictional (Gibbons 2018: 129). The sound worlds of each level reify this tiered structure – the metafictional dream world features Sakuraba’s genre-typical original score, the fictional scene of Chopin’s deathbed in Paris contains only an ominously ticking clock, and the real biographical intercuts shift focus to Chopin’s life and music, treating both with reverence (Gibbons 2018: 132). As an example, a brief exposition of the intercut from Chapter 2, “Revolution,” is instructive. As the Chopin piece accompanying this intercut is analyzed in Section 4, the present focus is on the captions presenting Chopin’s biographical information. As will become evident, the relationship between the historical Chopin and the fictional Chopin is problematized in this intercut, which mixes historically accurate detail with interpretational glosses that adapt and modify the historical Chopin to play the proper role of a video game protagonist.

In Figure 1, above, are four slides from the intercut. The intercut begins by describing the fall of Poland to Russian occupation and the failed November Uprising in 1830, setting the historical backdrop for the composition of Chopin’s “Revolutionary Étude.” Prior to the uprising, Chopin departed for Vienna to perform piano and to ensure his physical safety. Upon learning of the fall of Warsaw while residing in Stuttgart, Germany, Chopin composed the étude, encapsulating his tumultuous emotions over the events. Furthermore, Chopin lived from then on as an expatriate, never again to set foot in his native Poland. All of these facts are uncontroversial and belong to the historical Chopin, providing valuable context for players to understand both étude and video game.

Figure 1

Selected images from Chapter 2 “Revolution” intercut (Eternal Sonata)

The intercut also presents interpretations of these events, hoping to facilitate players’ identification with Chopin and his situation. For example, the penultimate statement of the intercut attempts to provide a window to Chopin’s emotions: “To Chopin, who genuinely loved his homeland of Poland, the insurrection’s failure was difficult to bear. But perhaps he found it even more difficult to bear the fact that he was safe in a foreign country.” While “survivor’s guilt” is certainly plausible for Chopin to have experienced in the situation, it is by no means a known fact. More potentially problematic is the intercut’s characterization of Chopin’s motivation for composing the “Revolutionary Étude”: “Chopin […] was physically weak, so his friends wanted him to use the piano as a weapon to fight for Poland.” Gibbons evaluates this statement and others in Eternal Sonata as “[leaning] disproportionately” on Chopin’s nationalist identity and motivations in order to “bring him into conformity with heroic stereotypes” (Gibbons 2018: 128–129). This tactic allows the developers to sidestep Chopin’s reputation as an effeminate salon pianist – a “composer for the ladies” (Samson 1992: 1–8) and “an enervated weakling” (Kallberg 199: 200) due to his tuberculosis – both of which make him a “far cry from the hypermasculine heroes” most commonly championed as main characters in video games (Gibbons 2018: 126). In the chapter 4 “Grande Valse Brillante” intercut, players are presented with another interpretive gloss:

Chopin appeared at Salons and dinner parties, performing music for small audiences. It is said that after these performances, Chopin returned to his room and played his piano furiously. He must have felt a frustrating anger towards himself, forced to suppress his true feelings, put on a mask, and perform music to please people.

This intercut implies that Chopin’s effeminate, sickly reputation was a mere façade, “a repression of his true, masculine self,” which is expressed truly only in strongly nationalist pieces like the “Revolutionary Étude” (Gibbons 2018: 131). By focusing myopically on Chopin’s nationalism, the developers can generate a metafictional narrative orbiting around war, rebellion, and political corruption suitable to a typical JRPG. In this perspective, just as Chopin secretly yearned to fight openly for Polish independence in the real world, he can act out his desire as an active combatant in the metafictional world. The “Revolution” intercut – along with intercuts from other chapters – thus fulfills its pedagogical role, educating players about the historical Chopin, whilst simultaneously adapting and sculpting his character into a fictional Chopin suitable to star as the main character of a video game.

4 Chopin’s “Revolutionary Étude” (Op. 10, no. 12): Semiosis

“No matter how much time passes, war remains.”

– Frédéric François Chopin (Eternal Sonata)

Chopin’s “Revolutionary Étude” (Op. 10, no. 12) is a critical cornerstone for interpreting Eternal Sonata; thus, an abbreviated hermeneutic interpretation is warranted. Topically, the chromatic, tempesta^[6] left-hand arpeggiation and pervasive dotted rhythms like martial trumpet calls denote a subject matter of armed conflict. Chopin composed the piece in the weeks following news of the fall of Warsaw to Russia, so his inspiration is simple to infer. The opening features two motives:^[7] the right-hand downward step to upward leap – playing an aggressive role – and the winding tempesta figure invoking chaos and anxiety, taking on a thematized and almost agential quality throughout the piece (see Figure 2). The main melodic motive is the ascending stepwise figure – which I dub the revolution motive – expressing the greatest agential energy as it strives to overcome tonal gravity. Its reversal is gradual stepwise descent, often achieved through suspension, as if dragged inexorably downward.

Figure 2

Melodic motives in Chopin’s “Revolutionary” Étude

With the exception of the coda, the étude’s tonal events correspond to a tragicnarrative archetype. Developed by Northrop Frye and adapted to music analysis by James Jakob Liszka and Byron Almén, narrative archetypes describe the meaning of the formal structure of a musical piece in terms of the opposition of contrasting elements – evaluated by listeners as positive or negative – and which of the contrasting elements remains at the outcome of the piece, as diagrammed below in Table 2:

The initial (-)^[8] order is firmly established by the tempesta introduction and C Minor main theme. The secondary theme transitions in a powerful, chromatic, ascending gesture to a perfect authentic cadence^[9] in B-flat Major; the revolution motive succeeds in breaking through the (-) order to express itself as the heroic (+) transgression (Figure 3). However, the hard-won tonicization of B-flat Major is immediately subverted through chromatic sequence, reestablishing the (-) order through a return of the tempesta and aggressive motives. Though the revolution motive is repeated with redoubled vigor and embellished rhythmic energy, its efforts are reversed by sequential descent and subsumed once more into the (-) order of C Minor just before the coda (Figure 4).

Figure 3

Secondary theme, (+) transgression

Figure 4

Final perfect authentic cadence, (-) outcome

The coda^[10] presents the piece’s greatest analytical puzzle – and most important hermeneutic window. After a definitive perfect authentic cadence in C Minor, the melody rises to E-natural, borrowed from the parallel major. Could this be a Picardy third,^[11] suggesting the bestowal of a (+) outcome by grace in a tragic-to-transcendent archetype (Hatten 1994: 26)? After all, previous passages had hinted at ambiguities of major mode subverted quickly into minor (mm. 17-18, 28, and 57). However, the tempesta motive has been transposed up a perfect fourth, reinterpreting the implied C Major as a V⁷/iv so that what could simply be plagal tonic confirmation actually denotes modulation to a new key in F. The final bell-like, proclamatory chords thus form a modulating half cadence – but the piece cuts off abruptly; as this is the final étude in the book, the entire Op. 10 ends tonally unstable (Figure 5).

Figure 5

Coda, harmonic instability – abrupt end, indeterminate future

In the “Revolutionary Étude,” Chopin grapples with hope and despair in the chaos of war. Its tragic narrative snuffs out the brief sliver of hope attained by the revolution motive, reminiscent of the events of the November Uprising. Yet he leaves the ultimate outcome open-ended and indeterminate in its coda, hinting at a Picardy third resolution that can be achieved only by defying conventional musical logic by modulating to a new key – in a coda that should simply confirm the tonic key. This move remains inconclusive; only injecting something new can break the cycle of war.

5 A tale of two composers: Agency, narrativity, and intertextuality

“The time has finally come for me to confront my own heart. I must make my choice now.”

– Frédéric François Chopin (Eternal Sonata)

The game’s themes and music culminate in its final act, set in the ethereal realm “Elegy,” where the souls of magic users who have succumbed to disease are trapped in a state between life and death, as Chopin is in the dream world. After the expected defeat of Count Waltz, Chopin himself faces Polka and the party in the game’s true final battle. During the clash, the previously distinct real and metafictional sound worlds collide, as the outcome determines Chopin’s real-world fate as well as that of the dream world. Sakuraba’s track “Rebuilding Ourselves” seems as if Chopin is forcibly imposing his own music onto the metafictional sound world (Gibbons 2018: 133). The track orchestrates the C Minor introduction and main theme^[12] of the “Revolutionary Étude” – the (-) order – nearly verbatim. There is only one marked alteration: This time, at the phrase’s end, there is no major/minor ambiguity, only decisively (-) order.

This time there is no breakthrough to a B-flat Major cadence, but an original secondary theme that constitutes a stronger (+) transgression through deceptive resolution to the major VI key area, A-flat Major. This new element derives from Sakuraba rather than Chopin, as the étude never featured major VI and the theme is in Sakuraba’s harmonic style. The harmony then oscillates between Chopin’s C Minor and Sakuraba’s A-flat Major, aurally representing the collision of sound worlds vying for control. The secondary theme returns in corrupted form, recontextualized over a Cm – C^o7 progression taken from mm. 13–14 of the étude. The (+) transgression is subsumed to Chopin’s (-) order. A developmental theme based on the étude’s aggressive motive and a quotation of the tempesta motive steer towards a return of the main theme, solidifying the (-) outcome.

This musical intersection of the historical and fictional Chopin represents a “startling moment of rupture” between the previously distinct narrative levels elaborated by Gibbons above (Gibbons 2018: 134). Interjections in the music serve to maximize its schizophrenic nature through a total breakdown of musical order. The melos^[13] of the track is twice obliterated with chaotic gestures reminiscent of a psychological breakdown, suggesting a fracturing of the music’s virtual subjectivity (Hatten forthcoming: Chapter 4). We hear Eternal Sonata’s crisis of musical identity firmly foregrounded as Chopin’s fictional and metafictional selves hang in the balance. Through orchestration of Chopin’s piano music, the whole dream world takes on his musical identity – except for the secondary theme. Because of the looping inherent in battle tracks, Rebuilding Ourselves is caught in a continual tragic arc, without the potential escape offered in the étude’s coda, reflecting the cyclical destruction of the dream world. Rather than minimizing conflict, these thematic parallels augment and foreground it.

Soon, the defeated composer falls, expecting to die and the dream world to fade. However, the fantasy remains, largely in ruins by dark energy released from Elegy by Count Waltz. Polka realizes only her magic, powered by her pure heart, can purge the sea of darkness and jumps off a cliff to sacrifice herself. To his and everybody’s surprise, Chopin awakens to see in horror that Polka has died, despite his efforts to prevent her fate by ending the dream. The scene cuts to Paris, where the doctor announces Chopin’s death at 2 AM. In the dream world, Chopin’s disembodied voice declares that Polka, as a fourteen-year-old girl, must live, and she is raised from the cliff and reunited with the party. When she sets foot on the ground, all life is restored to the metafictional world.

The final scene confounds many players and receives no mention in Gibbons’ treatment – yet it provides a key to understanding the game’s entire ending. At his Paris deathbed, Chopin’s spirit, clad in his dream-world garb, rises out of his body and begins to play his beloved Pleyel piano (Figure 6). Polish countess Delfina Potocka, a friend and piano student of Chopin’s, spontaneously begins to sing to his accompaniment. As the track continues, Chopin is shown playing the same music in the dream world. The song is Sakuraba’s “Kyoutenka,” which forms another intertext with Chopin’s music – this time with the “Raindrop” Prelude in D-flat Major, the first of his pieces heard in-game. “Kyoutenka” features a repeated A-flat 3 in the piano – precisely the same note and register of the prelude’s signature feature (Figure 7).

Figure 6

Chopin’s spirit in metafictional clothing plays the piano in his Paris apartment

Figure 7

Chopin’s “Raindrop” Prelude (Op. 28, no. 15) – note especially the repeated A-flat 3 in the left hand

It also parallels the prelude through frequent mode mixture,^[14] used in both for sentimental, Romantic effect. More importantly, “Kyoutenka” is in A-flat Major, picking up the key from the (+) transgression of “Rebuilding Ourselves.” This connection is reinforced by the introductory motive, outlining the same notes as the melody of Sakuraba’s original theme. The element previously corrupted and subsumed has now been accepted and incorporated in Chopin’s own playing. In the latter half of the track, as the game’s credits roll, Sakuraba’s orchestra takes over the melody from Potocka, redirecting the lieder style to his own. As the piano part fades out and Chopin’s image fades to black, the choir and orchestra take over to conclude in Sakuraba’s characteristic epic style. In this intertextual tale of two composers, Chopin has passed on the musical torch to Sakuraba.

6 Narrating near-death experience: Music as interpretive key to the artistic meaning of Eternal Sonata

“When one thing comes to an end, another begins.”

– Frédéric François Chopin (Eternal Sonata)

What light does semiosis of Eternal Sonata’s score shed on the artistic meaning of its complex and multiply ambiguous ending? As befits a story taking place in the mind of a musician, the marked intertextual relationships between Chopin’s and Sakuraba’s music serve as a hermeneutic key to decoding the game’s thematic meaning.

The key concept is that of intertextuality. Intertextuality is a semiotic resource with much potential for productive application, as it draws previously independent networks of meaning into relation with one another. For music in particular, quotation, paraphrase, and variation of previously composed pieces are a ubiquitous and powerful method that composers throughout history have used to augment their communicative resources for meaning-making. Director Hatsushiba amplifies the meaning-making resources of the video game by drawing on Chopin’s life as a subject; composer Sakuraba bolsters his own original score with particular references to Chopin’s pieces and musical style. Michael Klein, in his account of intertextuality, describes a dense web of texts and meaning that draws variously on musical semiotics, hermeneutics, aesthetics, and narrativity (Klein 2005: ix) containing centripetal and centrifugal forces that challenge existent, stable structures of meaning (Klein 2005: 31). Klein’s most daring and provocative claim is that intertextuality enables later texts to impact the meaning of earlier ones, an outrageously ontological claim of backwards-causation that he dubs transhistorical intertextuality (Klein 2005: 7–8, 12). To appropriate and rephrase Klein:

…the relationship between the texts in these intertexts is dynamically bilateral. Not only [does] Chopin help us interpret [Sakuraba and Eternal Sonata], but [Sakuraba and Eternal Sonata] help us interpret [Chopin] as well. […] This pursuit […] abolishes historical contradiction, allowing us the pleasure of reading [Sakuraba] as if he were the father of [Chopin], or [Sakuraba] as if he inspired [Chopin]. (Klein 2005: 11)

Eternal Sonata’s metafictional plotline forms a backwards-causation intertext with the events of Chopin’s life, taking artistic license to exaggerate particular aspects as it sees fit. Though the story’s themes originate in sign-complexes drawn from Chopin’s life, they are instantiated beyond him, addressing modern themes of environmentalism, suicide, abuse of addictive substances and technology, and more. Chopin lives on in his music through the backwards-causation intertext formed with Sakuraba’s Rebuilding Ourselves. The Revolutionary Étude, caught in a tragic cycle with only an incomplete hint of potential escape through frustrating conventional musical logic, forms the basis for future musical productivity when Sakuraba’s new secondary theme is added – leading eventually to the hopeful resolution in “Kyoutenka” that was only hinted at previously. Chopin’s pieces performed in the intercuts by Bunin are ossified in past history – essential and informative, yet stagnant. As Klein writes via Umberto Eco, signs are dead in isolation but “come to life with their use in an ecology of signs” (Klein 2005: 51; cf. Eco 1976: 49).

A second overarching theme is the acceptance of death. In the final battle, the creator confronts his creation directly, a conflict we hear encoded in Sakuraba’s track. If Chopin the creator wins, he awakes in Paris alone to find his creations are no more; he has reasserted his artistic authority, but at the loss of the art. However, by letting go and sacrificing his life, he can choose to break the egoistic cycle that ensnared his étude and the dream world. Paradoxically, it is by embracing his and Emilia’s deaths that he restores life to Polka, doomed to die again and again in the cycle of the dream world. Chopin must let go of his memory of Emilia – ossified as a terminally ill girl who can never live beyond fourteen – so that she may live on as Polka in the metafictional world. As the fictional Chopin declares before reviving Polka: “Death is a reality that is far too real. But I walked this dream-like journey within a dream, so that, once and for all, I could accept it.”

This is the message and unifying theme of Eternal Sonata – the ongoing existence, the eternal life of the artist enacted by the liberation of the art from the artist’s mind. The dream world is revivified after Chopin’s sacrifice and continues to exist even after the mind that conceived it has died. The metafictional world – though originating in Chopin’s life and music – is revitalized as an intertext imbued with the creative intentions of the game developers. And Chopin himself lives on through his music, taken up to be performed and used by others like Potocka and Sakuraba. This is the meaning of that final scene which has confounded so many: The art lives on through liberation from the artist, which Chopin comes to accept and facilitate by accompanying Potocka, passing the torch to Sakuraba’s original themes and orchestrations. As Klein writes, “If we listen to Chopin again and again; if we are drawn to understand some new detail previously overlooked; […] Chopin’s symptoms become our symptoms; his traumatic life and death questions become our questions. Chopin’s dreams become our dreams” (Klein 2015: 121). Eternal Sonata is an artistic exegesis of near-death experience, the dynamic struggle between grasping to control one’s own legacy and letting go to leave it in the hands of others, trusting that they will be faithful – and faithfully creative – to one’s beloved art.