Dear Branka,

As I told you elsewhere, Debussy was a familiar name at my home since very early in my life, maybe since I was just five or six years old. However, the only piece of music by him that we listened to in my house was his "Claire the Lune", which I suppose was then in all vogue and was, in addition, played by my mother at the piano. Also, it was the original piano version only which we used to listen to in a small pickup music player, and maybe by Alexander Brailovski, who was my mother's favorite interpreter over Sir Arthur Rubinstein - though I must say that this David Oistrak's violin -and piano rendering that you have presented here in a video is, of course, also wonderful.

On the other hand, at that time you could only get the old 78 rpm vinyl disks and our collection was unfortunately not very big. Even so, it contained the best classic music in the world. True, there might be great names absent in it like for example Bach and Mozart, which I guess my mother did not care much about at that stage of her life. But anyway, Claude Debussy's "Claire de Lune" was the most modern musical composition in our collection.

So it was only after many more years had elapsed that I became familiar with "La Mer" and the "Prelude to Afternoon of a Fawn". And only now, thanks to you, have I come to hear about and to listen to all these other beautiful Debussy's compositions. They all, plus the one that Roger McDivitt posted at my art forum a couple of days ago and which I am including below, definitely corroborate something that I only difussely perceived as a child while listening to the crystalline, liquid notes of Debussy's "Claire de Lune", something about which only now have I read, for the first time ever, in Baudelaire's precious poem "Harmony of Evening", and in the words of the composer himself:

"Do you find it difficult to conceive that one who sees mystery in everything — in the song of the sea, in the curve of the horizon, in the wind and in the call of the birds — should have been attracted to a religious subject...?"

Yes, his music was Poetry Itself to my ears. It made me feel in paradise. The Garden of Eden was magically brought to me in its notes. I had no great experience of the country, but Debussy's "Claire de Lune" made me dream of ever green fields plentiful with birds singing, grass and flowers and crystal-like rivulets running everywhere in the Sun, where we all, my family and I, could play and run and find solace for hours on end.

Thank you Branka for bringing back to my mind and soul such wonderful, privileged moments of my childhood. Yes, you have reawakened all that in me for the last couple of hours, and the experience has been magical, beautiful, unforgettable.

Bless you,

Miguel