Kurst Vacheq

Kurst Vacheq is the composer of the celebrated ballet Raven Field. He had previously written a handful of minor works, but it is his unquestioned masterpiece. The ballet was commissioned by Ivana Boritsi and it undoubtedly benefited from her patronage as it came to be recognised as a Borcan national treasure.

The composer was born in southeastern Borca in 709 BC. His mother was a immigrant from Kartakass. It is probable that she was also half-Vistani although this was consistedly denied by her and subsequently by her son. She was a gifted musician, entirely disinclined to perform publicly however. His father was a former military officer who had lost an arm in a skirmish on the Gundarak frontier and subsequently supported his family by ghost writing official histories for many of the land's aristocratic families.

Kurst received his education entirely from his parents until the age of thirteen when it was arranged for him to enter the household of a minor aristocratic family in Levkarest where he would receive formal training in music. He proved to be a talented pianist and a gifted composer. He supported himself for years ghost writing chamber music for the house composers of Borca's leading aristocratic families. All the while he dedicated his every spare moment to the composition of ballets. He was unable, however, to find buyers for these works, let alone backers willing to bring the works to the stage under his own name. At first this was a fault of the works, which displayed flashes of genius but on the whole were far from gripping. As the works improved, Kurst came to understand that the world of ballet in his native land was even more incestuous, pretentious, and bigoted than that of chamber music. Neither had he been bred of proper Borcan stock, nor had he been raised in the service of leading Borcan aristocrats, nor finally had he learnt his craft from its recognised and accepted masters.

Vacheq poured his growing anger into his composing and eventually he took his best work to date to Le Ballet National du Dementlieu where it received a genuine hearing and a great deal of constructive criticism before being ultimately rejected by the artistic director of the time. A subsequent work suffered the same fate. The work that followed proved to be the inspiration for a very different ballet penned by the artistic director with contributions from Vacheq. Vacheq's next work, The Poisoned Chalice, was accepted, albeit in a somewhat stripped down form. It was well received by the public at its opening in 744 BC. Its flaws were, however, attacked mercilessly by the critics. A Borcan noblewoman who had married into the Dementlieuse nobility judged these criticism so unjust that she wrote Ivana Boritsi about the brilliant Borcan artist who was being abused at the hands of the brutish Dementlieuse. The ruler of Borca wrote Vechaq and after meeting with him to discuss his next project agreed to stage it at Misericordia. Raven Field was staged before the crème de la crème of the Borcan aristocracy and they fell in love it. Later in 745 BC, it was staged in Levkarest where a somewhat wider audience swooned before Vacheq's artistic genius. Sadly, the artist would not live to see it staged 11 years later by Le Ballet National du Dementlieu.

The circumstances of the artist's demise in 747 BC are mysterious. He died at a fairly young age, relatively wealthy, adored, raised into the Borcan aristocracy, but with neither a family nor a known mistress. He was found lying in the streets of Levkarest early one evening, dead of no apparent cause, nearly two years to the day after the opening of Raven Field and just days before the Borcan opening of The Poisoned Chalice. Rumours that he succumb to the embrace of Ivana Boritsi are not especially credible. He lived only for his work, was not a handsome man, and betrayed no sign of being moved by the beauty of the first lady of Borca. He did not even come across as being particularly thankful to her for opening the way for his ultimate success, although he was never heard to utter a word slighting her patronage.

Rumours that Vacheq returned from the grave are tied to the controversial staging of Raven Field by Le Ballet National du Dementlieu in 757 BC. Its new artistic director, Claude Lemieux, made very significant "improvements" to the work that amounted to a desecration in Borcan eyes. A very ill-advised over-reaction by the Borcan ambassador provoked the Dementlieuse to respond in kind to Borcan insults. Lemieux's variation on Raven Field' was lionnised by pliant Dementlieuse critics as a "brilliant adaptation of Vechaq's initially muddled work". And after an unprecedently successful run, Lemieux's variation of Raven Field was taken on the road for a tour of Darkon in 758 BC. En route to Viaki, however, the national ballet and Liemeux vanished without a trace. Officially their disappearance remains an unsolved mystery. But there are whispers that Vachecq himself returned from the grave to take his revenge upon those who had wilfully defaced his chef d'oeuvre.