In a way, these interviews are a form of memoir. They are written records of oral documents. For documents they are: of the ideas and opinions of major figures of international musical life, committed to tape decades ago.

Their own memories of conversations with significant personalities of a previous generation are for me particularly valuable. Stravinsky's words to William Glock on a train in the 1930s, Richard Strauss talking to Neville Cardus and Hans Swarowsky, Béla Bartók to the child Tibor Varga, Alois Hába to Franz Schreker, Pierre Monteux's comments to Neville Marriner—all of this would probably be lost if it had not been recalled at a given moment during the course of our interviews.

My own impressions, prefixed to the conversations by way of introductions, are also memoirs in their own way. (A fuller memoir of my life experiences and my interactions with la vie musicale and notable musical artists forms part 2 of this book.)

In the 1970s, I published three collections of interviews in Hungarian: the harvest of my single-minded devotion to what I describe later on in this book as an obsession.

They have been slumbering within the covers of those books ever since. Thanks to the interest of the University of Rochester Press, I have awakened some of them and translated the texts back into English, for many of the cassettes were either stolen or lost in moving from one apartment and one country to another.