My frequent thoughts of Nell are more pleasant than sad, doubtless because I saw so little of her during the last three years of her life. What is revived is the happy début. To recall her is to recall her repertory, those many works we all heard first through her: Schoenberg's Gurrelieder, Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex and Mavra, Milhaud's Chansons hébraïques, Chanler, Mahler, Fauré, Copland's In the Beginning, Messiaen's Poèmes pour Mi. Reading through the Messiaen again took me to his other cycle, Chants de terre et ciel, which in turn, like Proust's bit into the madeleine, brought back rehearsals in 1946 with Janet Fairbank on the banks of Wisconsin's Lake Geneva. In those postwar years Messiaen already was what he remains, the most interesting composer in France today. << less