User blog comment:CrazyWords/My First True Review: Nightingale, by HumboltLycanthrope/@comment-26030957-20150531031312

Why is there a player piano? This question leaves me wondering if you read the original story. The Hans Christian Anderson story is about a nightingale who can sing a song so sweet it makes the emperor cry, yet is replaced with a mechanical bird. Though the mechanical bird’s song lacks feeling and spontaneity it is nevertheless regarded higher than the flesh and blood creature’s tune. So, with no one even noticing, the nightingale escapes his gilded cage and leaves the palace. In the end, though, the nightingale returns to the Emperor as death is about to take him and sings a song so lovely it staves off death’s embrace, saving the Emperor. So, the player piano that takes over the job of Nightingale, the whorehouse’s pianist, is obviously meant to represent the mechanical bird taking over the feathered nightingale. The entire crux of the story revolves around this point: when the player piano arrives at Madame Cheri’s Palace everything changes. My original premise was a jukebox that replaced a country western singer. Then I thought that the original fairytale was a metaphor for modernity taking away the natural beauty of life. How mankind worshipped his own artificial devices over nature. In the original story it was only the farmer, who worked the earth with his hands, who could hear that the mechanical bird lacked something special. So, I thought 1910 would be a great setting to show the clash of modernity with old time ways. In the story, you will notice, there is car versus horse, heroin versus opium, pipe versus syringe, and, of course, piano player versus player piano. The player piano is where I started the entire idea of the story, and is the foundation I built the rest of it around.