piecing the clues together

 

As something of a jigsaw puzzle fiend I was pleased to find this one by acclaimed Austrian puzzle maker Piatnik in our local thrift store. Usual approach, sift out and start on the edge pieces. That was the only familiar aspect to a challenge that turned out to be the hardest puzzle I’ve come across. What next..? There were no colours to collect, no sky. So I progressed by gathering pieces with vertical lines, those representing the ends of bars. After much effort I had a skeletal framework. So much for the easy part!

 

A click on the Piatnik site revealed this example is sixth on their seven-tier difficulty scale – Extreme - but it isn’t in my nature to be beaten. I dug seriously deep within my limited knowledge of music notation. Easy enough to sort out the alphabetic dynamics but when I ran out of these I hit the slurs and ties (curved lines), rests and clefs etc. Eventually I had to work through the remaining large pile of staves and notes.

 

A few minutes here and there totalling maybe an hour a day and fourteen days later I slipped the final piece into place... well there are four ominous gaps. What can you expect from a cheapie.