Item Seed: Russian Minuets.

Russian Minuets

Description: a set of thirty minuets, scored for harpsichord and written by Makar Olegovich Samarin (1702-1756?).  The individual sheet music seems to have been printed in the 19th century in France, then bound in leather a century later by a Berlin bookbinder of dubious reputation.  Rumors that the leather is actually tanned human skin are false.

Powers: If a Russian Minuet is performed before a live audience of at least one hundred people, one of those people will die of heart failure before the night is out.  Resuscitation can work, if there’s medical staff on hand and ready to spring into action, but there’s no way to prevent the original heart failure.  As for everybody else: it is apparently a marvelous rush to feel a Russian Minuet target another person. The sensation is not physically addictive, but it definitely can produce a psychological dependence.  Fortunately, both the positive and negative effects only work in a live performance; streaming, televised, and digital productions do not have the same effect.

Makar Olegovich Samarin was a Russian composer attached to the court of Elizabeth of Russia during its most extravagant periods. It was widely believed that he was a sorcerer of some power, and certainly his various patrons were unsavory at best and objects of fearful rumor at worst.  Despite Elizabeth’s well-known ban on capital punishment, few of her courtiers were surprised when Samarin disappeared in 1756; a headless skeleton still wearing his distinctive topcoat was found in a shallow grave in 1790, and was generally accepted as being him.

The Russian Minuets were written between the years 1745 and 1751, but their unique murderous qualities were not fully appreciated until 1753 or so.  Samarin reportedly performed his Minuets himself, with his ears plugged with wax to avoid any chance of being the next victim; his private concerts were anonymously but enthusiastically attended by the more wild-blooded aristocrats and occultists.  He did not enjoy the favor of Elizabeth, due to her sincere piety; his death was likely at the hand of pro-Elizabeth vigilantes who knew that she would not even execute a known sorcerer.

Supposedly, Samarin’s papers were all burned; but the Minuets was discovered by Paris’s occult scene and reprinted in a limited edition of loose sheet music in 1874.  At least one copy of the Russian Minuets was later bound in Weimar-era Germany. While that particular bookbinder did not survive World War II, the book did, and is now possessed by a rather exclusive club of very rich, occult decadents.  They allow one performance of one Russian Minuet per year, and seats in that particular amphitheater go for absurd prices. This is not out of any sort of bizarre ethical considerations; discreet testing demonstrated that there was no reliable way to only sacrifice lower class listeners, and there was a limit to how often upper class ones could suddenly die before anybody noticed.

As for the music itself?  Well, they’re all very nice and delicate, if you like minuets.  They certainly don’t sound like random murder generators. This incongruity often nags at people, although they can sometimes have difficulty articulating precisely why.