When I opened the door, a woman was sitting at the front desk. That was it. I was the only guest.
I was looking for museums on my iPhone when the "Dvořák Museum" caught my eye. The name sounded familiar, and when I looked it up, it turned out to be the composer who wrote the "New World".
I had no idea he was from the Czech Republic.
Right near the hotel.
I walked through a quiet, sparsely trafficked street to the museum. There was no one at the entrance.
I bought one ticket and was asked which country I was from. When I answered Japan, they lent me materials in Japanese.
The woman at the front desk was neither curt nor smiling—she simply sold the ticket in a matter-of-fact way, as if doing her job.
There were extremely few exhibits. After one circuit, even on the second floor there were really only a handful of displays.
Maybe because it was a weekday, the museum was quiet and sparsely attended. On the floor there were only me and one woman. The wooden floor was a bit damp, perhaps because of the rain.
He performed in many countries—Saint Petersburg, Germany, Poland—and also served as a professor at an American university. Trophies from that time were on display.
And the desk and chair he used. They were arranged so you could touch them.
I touched the part of the chair he would have touched when pulling it out. With my eyes closed, I tried to feel how he had pulled the chair.
The wood was rough. That roughness came through precisely because it was a chair he had used thousands of times.
I'm touching the chair that a great musician once sat in. Thinking how simply amazing that is, I felt astonishment and a kind of bewilderment.
He used this chair decades ago.
The piano he used.
To think that, in such an old era, someone could create music so complex and beyond words.
I'm not really interested in museums themselves. But when it's the museum of a musician I love, it's a different story.
I read the explanations carefully, took it in, and felt.
The moment I stepped outside it felt cold, as if I'd returned to the real world. There was a somewhat sad mood.
