The Most Beautiful Moment in Life, BTS’s monumental series dedicated to the fragile concept of youth, had its 10th anniversary on April 29, 2025.
The series, comprised of the albums The Most Beautiful Moment in Life Pt. 1, The Most Beautiful Moment in Life Pt. 2 and the compilation album The Most Beautiful Moment in Life: Young Forever, also launched the Bangtan Universe, a fictional narrative woven through the albums’ music videos, but also promotional trailers and short films, and later expanded to include a webtoon, a book, and a collection of notes adding details to the story.
The Most Beautiful Moment in Life series marked an evolution for BTS from their hip hop-centred songs and energetic and aggressive delivery to a softer and more poetic sensibility and sound, spearheaded by member SUGA. The piano, which had started to appear in songs like the introspective “Tomorrow” and the jazz-infused “Rain,” from Skool Luv Affair-Special Edition and Dark & Wild, both released in 2014, became more prominent. This pointed to the continuous expansion of their storytelling and musical vocabulary.
ARMY, BTS’s fandom, has developed numerous guides and methodologies for entering and understanding the Bangtan Universe, a seminal journey of discovery for new and old fans. The experience is deeply immersive, with storytelling, themes, lyrics, sounds, and musical and visual cues and motifs echoing throughout, resulting in an endlessly rich and cohesive whole. Starting with The Most Beautiful Moment in Life Pt. 1, the piano became one of the elements connecting these thematic, musical, visual, and narrative cues.
We are first introduced to the piano motif on “Hold Me Tight,” in The Most Beautiful Moment in Life Pt. 1. The song begins with a piano melody evocative of lost memories, then gently transitions into a polished R&B sound. Despite the sleek and cool beat, the lyrics are intense and describe the deep longing that comes after the end of a relationship, “Hold me tight Hug me, Can you trust me, can you trust me, can you trust me, Hold me tightly into your arms,” they sing in the chorus.
The piano doesn’t come back in full until the last song of the album, “Outro: Love is Not Over.” Here, the wonder of the melody and chords that open “Hold Me Tight” have turned more melancholic, slower and lower in the piano.
The Most Beautiful Moment in Life Pt. 1 was released on April 29, 2015. The same day, the video for the main track, “I NEED U” was released. “I NEED U” is a heavy synth track, intense and emotional, and does not feature an acoustic piano sound. However, a few days later, BTS released an “Original Version” of the music video that included the piano at the beginning of “Outro: Love is Not Over” as an extended intro in which the BTS members’ Bangtan Universe characters are introduced one by one.
The intro is melancholic and poetic, especially the moment the four Chinese characters that give its name to the series, “花樣年華,” appear under gently falling petals. This image evokes the fleeting nature of youth and innocence. In Korean, the equivalent characters are 화양연화, which are pronounced “Hwayangyeonhwa” and usually abbreviated to “HYYH,” the name most commonly used to refer to the The Most Beautiful Moment in Life series.
The piano plays an even greater musical role in The Most Beautiful Moment in Life Pt. 2, released in November 2015. However, what brings the piano to the fore as a major musical element of HYYH is a video BTS released as part of the promotion of the album. Titled “화양연화 on stage: prologue” this video served as the announcement for their album comeback as well as their upcoming tour.
The video is a continuation of the story that began in the “I NEED U” video, expanding each of the members’ characters’ storylines. The opening scene shows BTS member V, his hands bloody and his face in shocked despair as “Clair de lune,” the third movement from Claude Debussy’s Suite bergamasque plays in the background. The choice is inspired. Many of the characteristics of Impressionist music — its emphasis on mood rather than distinct melody lines or its use of chords that do not resolve in clear ways — are the perfect vehicle to express the complex emotions BTS explored in The Most Beautiful Moment in Life and the accompanying Bangtan Universe.
The juxtaposition of “Clair de lune” with the images of V’s character in the aftermath of a violent event, underscores the emotional tension that characterizes the Bangtan Universe — a story about seven boys who meet in school and go on to suffer devastating events in their own lives and as friends. Rather than complementing them, the opening bars of Debussy’s “Clair de lune” serve as a counterpoint to the violence of the images.
Delicate and evocative, these first few bars are the musical equivalent of Claude Monet’s hazy, diffuse Impression, Sunrise, the painting that inspired the name of the Impressionist Movement. The effect is dissociative, when the mind, living through a nightmare, desperately tries to return to moments of happiness and peace.
The video cuts to these memories, a sunny breezy day, and the seven boys running through a forest and playing in an abandoned pool. This shift also brings a change in the music, as “Clair de lune” transitions into a piano-based version of “Butterfly,” a song from The Most Beautiful Moment in Life Pt. 2 that later appears in the last album of the trilogy under the title “Prologue Mix.” These images, like most promotional photos and videos from the era, are shot in a cinematic soft focus which is often used to signal distant memories or a dream, another parallel to the Impressionist painting style. If The Most Beautiful Moment in Life Pt. 1 marked BTS’s shift towards a greater exploration of sounds and genres, “Butterfly” is the song where this enhanced lyrical and poetic sensibility reaches its peak.
The lyrics of “Butterfly” utilize the image of the butterfly as a symbol of fragility and impermanence. Capturing a butterfly’s beauty with our eyes often feels like a brief miracle and throughout, the song talks about the fear of losing a person and the fragility of love and memories.
“Will you stay by my side
Will you promise me
If I touch you, that you might fly away, that you might be shattered,
I’m scared scared scared”
“Like a wind that gently strokes me,
like a dust that lightly drifts in the air,
you’re there but, for some reason, I can’t reach you”
“Butterfly” could be considered the emotional center of The Most Beautiful Moment in Life trilogy. Like Debussy’s “Clair de lune,” “Butterfly” is delicate in a dreamlike way. In particular, the “Prologue Mix” switches the acoustic guitar of the first version into an ethereal piano intro that mirrors the fragile feeling of the lyrics. The “Prologue Mix” version also concludes in a hesitant tone, with a slow, descending melody that ends on a striking dissonant chord. This chord shifts the dreamlike yearning of the song into uncertainty, similar to the feeling of reliving a painful memory while reminiscing about happier times. In a way, this dissonant chord encapsulates the tone, emotional direction and complexity of the HYYH narrative.
One of the characteristics of Impressionist music is that, like the painting movement, it depicts moods more than concrete feelings or concepts, conveying more vague or diffuse emotional states. Composers implemented many innovations, but one of the main ones was the use of extended chords such as 9ths, 11ths or 13ths which complexify basic minor and major chords by adding notes that increasingly add colors to the main chord. Some of these chords are dissonant and many do not resolve neatly. As explained by pianist and educator Allysia Van Betuw, “This lack of resolution just leaves the listener feeling like they aren’t anchored in any one key; […] kind of like floating through a keyless dreamland which leads us to a tonality or lack of a tonal center.”
The Most Beautiful Moment in Life trilogy, in the way it depicts the confusing, contradicting, ever-shifting emotions we experience in youth, also could leave the listener feeling like they “aren’t anchored in any one key” or emotion, without any clear resolution; at times, even feeling dissonant emotions. This is exemplified not only through the songs on the albums and how they interact with each other (Boastful songs like “Dope” where BTS proudly sing about their hard work and work ethic appear in the same album as the moody “I NEED U, for example) but through the story as a whole as built through its many audiovisual components.
In their 2023 book, Beyond the Story: 10-Year Record of BTS, the success of “I NEED U,” the title track from The Most Beautiful Time Pt. 1, is attributed to the song’s contrasting moods, which together, gave the song its emotional power: “With intensity and sadness appearing constantly alongside one another, listeners felt sad while also becoming more and more elated. Then, in the chorus, these emotions fuse together and explode.” The song did not fit a specific genre, “it wouldn’t be called hip-hop or EDM or dance music,” however, despite these deeply contrasting moods, “the members […] intuitively accepted this song born out of the boundaries between genre and genre, emotion and emotion.”
Similarly, “Butterfly,” and “RUN,” the lead single from The Most Beautiful Moment in Life Pt. 2, contain within them contrasting or overlapping emotions in their music and lyrics. As explained in Beyond the Story: 10-Year Record of BTS, “Butterfly” was “about BTS’s internal anxiety and sadness, which existed both in the real world and within their music videos,” while in “RUN” even more moods coalesce within a single song: “For BTS, who had shouted out, ‘If you think you’re gonna crash, accelerate even more,’ their situation was a complex combination of hardship and expectation, sadness and hope. Within the melody of “RUN,” they needed to capture this complex emotion, as well as the will to keep pressing on.”
The brilliance of The Most Beautiful Moment in Life trilogy and the Bangtan Universe narrative woven through the three albums is in how the albums and songs work on their own and as part of a whole. So, even if not every song is built around the piano, the piano functions as a unifying instrument and sound which, when juxtaposed with the songs as an intro or outro, such as in the “I NEED U (Original Version)” video, immediately evokes a feeling of yearning — for a past that’s now gone, for a past that could have been, or even for a future that may never be.
In a way, the sound of the piano represents the emotions that coexist alongside the happier ones; the sadness, regret, fear or pain that color our passage from youth to adulthood. The effect it creates is similar to the sudden chill we feel when the clouds cover the sun on a bright spring day, or when an unexpected memory takes us away for a few seconds from enjoying the present moment.
Musically, the piano elicits the nostalgia steeped in the series due to its association with the music of the past, in particular Romantic and Impressionist music of the 19th century, two movements that elevated and expanded the use and capabilities of the piano.
The nature of the piano itself may contribute to the images and emotions it helps evoke: a predominately solo instrument, the piano allows the player to play a different note simultaneously (a chord) or in succession (an arpeggio) with each of their 10 fingers. Though this is not based on any musical theory, this characteristic of the piano strikes me as very appropriate to illustrate the musical and narrative complexity of HYYH and the Bangtan Universe.
Although all the members contributed to the writing of the album, SUGA, one of BTS’s three rappers, was the main composer and writer on The Most Beautiful Moment in Life series and as described in Beyond the Story: 10-Year Record of BTS, “essentially locked himself up in the studio” throughout the production.
Despite SUGA being recruited into BTS as a producer and songwriter, and later becoming a rapper, composer and full member of the band, SUGA’s musical education began with the piano. In keeping with BTS’s deeply authentic and personal approach to songwriting, the music and lyrics SUGA wrote for The Most Beautiful Moment in Life Pt. 1 and Pt. 2 are suffused with his own stories and experiences. It’s not surprising then, that the piano plays such an important role not only in the music but for his character in the Bangtan Universe storyline.
Imagine SUGA’s character in the story as the root note of a chord (the main note on which a chord is built, for example, the C major chord is made of the notes C, E and G) and the six other members’ characters being a new note added to that chord, each note adding a new emotion to that basic major or minor chord and creating a whole that is multilayered, undefinable, and complex. The dissonant chord at the end of “Butterfly Prologue Mix” could be an illustration of this.
In a way, the piano also helps to sonically illustrate the concept of “han,” one of the most profound elements of The Most Beautiful Moment in Time trilogy and the Bangtan Universe. “Han” has no equivalent word in English. Its definition includes a combination of complex emotions such as “unresolved resentment against injustice suffered,” “helplessness” due to “overwhelming circumstances,” a feeling of “abandonment,” and “acute pain and sorrow.”
The Bangtan Universe extends beyond The Most Beautiful Moment in Life series through the next two albums, Wings and You Never Walk Alone, and then through BTS’s Love Yourself trilogy, which continues to develop the themes of youth through the concept of love and ultimately, of loving yourself.
The piano plays an even greater role as the story of the Bangtan Universe continues in Wings, released in October 2016. With Wings, BTS started to include solo songs within albums, each song representing a thematic element explored within the album’s concept. SUGA’s solo song in Wings is called “First Love.”
In this song, whose title at first may suggest romantic love, SUGA describes his relationship with his childhood brown upright piano.
“A brown piano that’s sitting in the corner of my memory.
A brown piano that’s sitting in the corner of my childhood home”
“I remember the time
Around my grade-school days
when I became taller than you
I neglected you who I had adored so much
The image of you being abandoned with dust piling on your once-shiny keys”
The song is a poignant ode to the relationship between an artist and their instrument, and more largely, between an artist and their dream. The piano stands in as the loyal friend who accompanied him through his hardest years and experiences, waiting silently and without judgment until they find each other again. “First Love” is remarkable in that it helps to further contextualize and reaffirm the choice of using the piano as one of the central musical building blocks of the series.
The Wings album promotions included a series of extraordinary short films which preview the seven individual songs that would appear on the album. SUGA’s short film is built around a piano, and it’s a nightmaresque expansion of his Bangtan Universe character’s story from the “I NEED U” and “RUN” videos. The piano is central to the character, representing the joy, innocence, and tragedy of his childhood and youth. It’s a rich and essential piece of the puzzle that contributes to making BTS’s Bangtan Universe an endless source of enjoyment, fascination, and study.
All lyrics translation by Doolsetbangtan.
This essay was first published on Medium.
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