Before leaving for Germany, I spent a few hours in London with Nicholas Medtner. I had admired him since my youth in Moscow, where the shy and unobtrusive man and his noble art had made him one of the most loved musicians. His brother, the violist, said to me once, “He is an eternity who thinks himself a day.” In his modest apartment in London he spoke hesitantly, as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t. He went to the piano and played a few pages from a manuscript. / He stopped. He looked lonely and lost. “No one really wants my music,” he said. He shouldn’t have left Russia, I thought with heaviness, bidding good-by to the wonderful man. << less