A piece came to me, and was almost forced on me urgently just before Christmas last year.  I knew a conductor, a 95-year-old conductor who was called the oldest conductor at Carnegie Hall.  And he had worked also with the St Cecilia Chorus for 60 years, and he’d written a wonderful book about music, and he was just a marvellous old man who seemed so youthful and resilient and spritely.

When there was going to be a Messiah, some of the heavy singers would, you know, who were 60, some of them, would plod in with the heaviness of 60, and David, at 95, would leap onto the podium and... like a boy of 20, and in a beautiful mellow baritone voice he would always talk to the audience first about... say about the Messiah and how Handel had... how some of the most devout seeming and solemn songs, in fact, had been taken by Handel from bawdy Italian songs at the time.

David had a strong feeling there’s no such thing as religious music or military music, there’s music which can be used in the context of religion or falling in love or... or whatever.  And, in particular, David’s... he would do a Christmas oratorio, but he would also do the Messiah every Christmas.  And, now, for the first time in 60 years there was not a Randolph Messiah because he had died earlier this... that year, rather suddenly. And I wanted to write a piece about him, and to start the piece by saying, something is missing, you know, what we’ve had in New York for 60 years, every Christmas, has gone. And there was no time to... you know, I wrote the piece on December 20th and it had to be published by Christmas, it had to be published electronically, and I was very glad when I could send it to the Paris Review electronically.