He [Nikolas Nabokov] would show me sketches of the ballet he was then writing for the Paris Opéra, dancing them out for me to visualize them. Some years later, in a Chicago hotel room, it was as if our Paris days had never been interrupted: there was no piano, and he demanded of my auditive imagination that I picture – by reading and humming with him some pages still in the blueprint stage – what his Second Symphony, later played by Mitropoulos, would finally become.