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may make it somewhat easier to understand why I didn’t like opera. What my family liked, though, was certainly not the operas of Richard Wagner but Italian opera, the pinnacle of my family’s taste, I almost said tolerance, being the opera
Aida
. I grew up in a musical milieu—insofar as I can call my childhood milieu a musical milieu at all, which I cannot, because I would call my childhood milieu any other milieu but a musical milieu—where the remarks that were passed about Richard Wagner, for example, were of the kind “Wagner is
loud
, Wagner is
difficult
” or, to mention a remark made in connection with another composer, “If it has to be a Strauss, then make it Johann,” and so forth. In short, I grew up in a milieu that was just as stodgy in respect to music as it was in every other respect, which did not leave my taste completely unscathed. I would not venture to state categorically that it was exclusively the influence of my family, but it is an indisputable fact that, up until the moment when I got my ticket to RichardWagner’s opera
Die Walküre
from the stenographer Schaeffer in that editorial office, I liked instrumental music exclusively, and I disliked any music in which there is singing (excepting the
Ninth Symphony
, and by that I mean Beethoven’s, not the Mahler
Ninth Symphony
, which I got to know later on, much later on, at just the right time, at a time when thoughts about death were manifesting, when I was making acquaintance with thoughts about death, indeed, what I would have to call a process of familiarising myself with, if not exactly befriending, thoughts about death), as if in the human voice alone, or to be more precise, the singing voice, I saw some kind of polluting matter which casts a poor light on the music. All the musical precursors of which I partook prior to hearing the Wagner opera had been purely instrumental precursors, chiefly orchestral, which I got to at best sporadically, primarily through the agency of that exceedingly testy old man at the Music Academy, known to every student or student type, who, due to some eye defect, wore a perennial look of distrust but, for a forint or two pressed into his palm, would let any student or student type into the auditorium, testily ordering them to stand by the wall and then, as soon as the conductor appeared at the stage door leading to the podium, would direct them in a harsh voice to anyunoccupied free seats. It would be fruitless for me to muse now over why, how, and on what impulse I came to like music; it is a fact, however, that around that time, when I was still not yet able to call myself a journalist, when my perpetually problematic life was perhaps at its most problematic because that life was at the mercy of my family, a family that was already on the point of breaking up around that time, and subsequently, during the disaster era, broke up completely, to be dispersed into prisons, foreign countries, death, poverty, or even, in the rarer cases, prosperity, a life from which already then, as ever since, I was constantly obliged to flee; it is a fact, therefore, that even then, as little more than a child, I would have been unable to tolerate that life, my life, without music. I think it was that life which prepared me, or in truth I should say rather that life which
rehearsed
me, for the disaster-era life which ensued not long afterwards, palliated as it was by reading and music, a life comprising several separate lives that played into one another’s hands, each one able to annihilate the others at will, yet each holding the others in balance and constantly offering formulations. In this sole respect, purely in respect of this balancing, the balancing of small weights, my seeing and hearing
Die Walküre
,being receptive to
Die Walküre
, being overwhelmed by
Die Walküre
, undoubtedly represented a threat in a certain sense: it cast too big a weight onto the scales. What is more, that event—Richard Wagner’s