I recall the day he sat at an old upright piano and hammering, crooning, whistling the various parts, evoked Tristan und Isolde more dramatically than an operatic company – without score, for Wagner too had been committed to memory. No single feat, however, made a greater impression on me than one performed during a lesson. Maurice Ravel suddenly burst into our midst, the ink still drying on a piano-and-violin sonata which he had brought along. It seemed his publishers, Durand, wished to hear it immediately (in those days publishers did not accept anybody’s work unheard, not even Ravel’s; what would they have done, I wonder, with dodecaphonic scores?). Enesco, chivalrous man that he was, craved Aba’s and my indulgence – as though I might draw myself up to my full four foot six inches and thunder, “What a nuisance!” – then, with Ravel at the piano, sight-read the complex work, pausing now and again for elucidation. Ravel would have let matters rest there, but Enesco suggested they have one more run-through, whereupon he laid the manuscript to one side and played the entire work from memory. Such mnemonic tours de force bore out my conviction that this tree of a man, as he seemed to me, drew musical intelligence straight from the source. << less