In this blog post, I’ll follow the life of 1900 from the movie ‘The Legend of 1900’ and reflect on the choice between staying in a small world and the fear of venturing into the infinite world.
In the film’s final scene, a man known as Denny Budman, T.D. Lehman, or simply 1900 hides aboard the ‘Virginia’, a ship already slated for demolition. The ship, once filled with the boisterous feasts and dances of sailors and passengers, is now packed with an immeasurable amount of dynamite. On a ship without a piano, 1900 begins to play into the void. With all ten fingers, he plays music—as he always does—for an audience of no one, or rather, with only the endless sea and the ship about to sink as his listeners. He begins to hear music that makes no sound. Just as the music—which has always been there and will never end—resounds only within his mind, the explosion of the massive ship sounds as if it were harmonizing with that silent melody, and he shares the ship’s fate.
About 30 years earlier, poor stowaways were frantically shoveling coal into the fire below deck on the Virginia. Meanwhile, the upper class was busy dancing to lively jazz on the upper deck. The ship was sailing toward the United States. Many passengers had been traveling aboard the Virginia for a long time. One day, a man who spotted the Statue of Liberty in the distance, holding aloft her torch through the fog, shouted, “It’s America! I can see America!” Immediately, cheers erupted, and all the passengers rushed onto the deck, swept up in joy and elation for quite some time. Soon, the passengers, having completed their long journey, poured out into the port of New York. Denny Budman, a Black crew member, goes to the banquet hall to search the space thoroughly for any items the upper-class passengers might have left behind—and discovers an abandoned child. He names the boy 1900. The boy begins to grow up on the ship, regarding Denny Budman as his father. He spends his childhood on the ship without ever setting foot on land.
The scene changes. Even at the age of 27, 1900 has never set foot on land. Perhaps this is because of his belief—taught to him by his “father,” Denny Budman, when he was young—that “the outside world is full of evil things.” He has lived his life at sea. And that one massive ship is his entire world and his entire life. The piano in the ship’s ballroom served as a brush for him, allowing him to paint a picture of life aboard the ship and imagine journeys to the outside world. Although he had never formally studied the piano, he displayed a natural talent for expressing himself through music. That is how he learned to live. One day, he met a friend named Max Thuni, who played the trumpet.
Max was captivated by 1900’s appearance, music, and way of life. Influenced not only by 1900’s words and actions but by every single aspect of him, Max began to watch over him. However, 1900 did not exist in the world where people lived. His name did not exist in the city, in churches, in prisons, in any hospital, or even on a common baseball team. Only Max, his trumpet-playing and only friend, kept him deeply etched in his memory.
Suddenly, the jazz legend Jelly Roll Morton, having heard rumors about 1900, stormed onto the Virginia. Rumors of 1900 had spread far and wide to the world on land, making him famous, and so the jazz legend Morton challenged 1900 to a piano duel. With the press and passengers who had flocked from all over as their audience, the famous master and the unknown master began their piano duel. At first, 1900 remains indifferent toward the performer, who is brimming with vanity and arrogance, but as they exchange musical passages, he gradually reveals his own musical world and emotions. With a final performance filled with the loneliness and bitterness of a lifetime spent at sea without family, as well as his fear of venturing into the outside world, he wins the audience’s recognition and emerges victorious. The whole world began to take notice of him.
Just then, he finds his heart stolen by a young woman passing by on the ship. Filled with love, he weaves his story into his piano compositions. He practices and agonizes day after day, hoping to deliver the recording of his music to the young woman he has fallen in love with, but in the end, he is unable to do so. The young woman disembarks in New York to pursue her own life, while 1900 remains unable to leave the ship. This incident prompts 1900 to resolve to disembark. He wanted to venture out into the world to live an ordinary life, and he also wanted to hear the “sound of the sea from the land” that the young woman had spoken of. After a long farewell with the crew, he begins to take a few awkward steps down the stairs leading to the shore. One step, then another…. It seemed as if he were leaping into the world. Yet, just one step short of setting foot on land, he stopped. Gazing at the distant shore with an unfathomable look, he suddenly rushed back onto the ship and hid himself away.
From that moment on, he abandoned the beautiful music of his past and expressed the discord within his heart through dissonant melodies. His attempt to venture into the vast world had long since lost the strength to recover. His friend Max also ends his connection with the sea after completing his performance contract on the Virginia. Naturally, 1900 experiences the sadness of parting with him.
Several years later, Max visits the Virginia, which is scheduled to be scuttled. Remembering 1900, he mobilizes people to search for him in the hope that he might still be on board, but in the end, he cannot find him. Just as he was about to give up on reuniting with 1900, 1900 appeared before Max as if by a miracle. He then told Max about the challenge he had failed to meet.
“I’ve been playing infinite music on 88 finite keys. But the moment I was about to step ashore, I saw a keyboard that was endlessly infinite. What on earth am I supposed to do? How can I choose just one street, one woman, one house, or one view? The world is boundless and infinite. That terrifies me so much. I’ve only learned how to live on a finite piano keyboard and a finite ship. Only God can play a piano with infinite keys.”
Faced with a world far too vast for him to have ever experienced, he could not overcome his fear. Unable to muster the courage to leave the ship, 1900 gives up on venturing onto land. Max, too, fails to persuade him and leaves the ship alone. And the brief reunion with 1900 comes to an end all too quickly. 1900 drifts out to the open sea with the Virginia and ultimately meets his end in the ship’s explosion.
The scene shifts once more. Max discovers a trace of 1900 on a record containing his only remaining love song. As he reminisces, he recounts 1900’s long story to the owner of the music store, then, looking somewhat forlorn, puts on his hat and steps out onto the autumn street. The pianist known as 1900 left behind a legendary tale for his friend Max and the music store owner before disappearing.
As I’ve watched 1900’s story unfold on screen, I’ve seen how a pianist’s life began and ended within a small world. Though he traveled anywhere on Earth in his imagination, his body never once left the sea. A small man who, for his entire life, could only gaze at the land without ever setting foot on it—who sometimes fell in love with and longed for a woman on the mainland, yet could never make his way there. Yet, as I encountered the story of the greatest pianist in history, a pang of emotion tugged at my heart. Perhaps our own lives, at times, resemble the life he lived. We cannot easily break free from the way we’ve been taught to live in the world we belong to, and we are afraid in the face of such immense change. This is because it takes tremendous courage to step out into a wider world. As 1900 said, we who live our daily lives playing a finite keyboard may sometimes, when we encounter a world that feels overwhelmingly vast, empathize with the fear he felt when faced with an infinite keyboard.
