I awoke with a terrible pain in my chest. I sprang from the bed and sat down in my armchair. (I must correct this, for I just remembered that it was different: I awoke with an extremely unpleasant feeling, but without a definite pain, but I hurried in spite of it (!) to my armchair.) I became continually worse. We called doctors…I had believed that I had a heart attack or heart spasm. But Dr Jones determined that this was not the case and gave me an injection of Dilaudid ‘in order to bring the patient at ease’. It worked very quickly. The pain went away. Then I must have lost consciousness. For the last thing that I heard was my wife saying ‘you take his feet and I will take his shoulders’, and apparently they returned me to the bed. I do not know how long I was unconscious. It must have been several hours, for the first thing I remember was that a man with coal-black hair was bending over me and making every effort to feed me something. My wife said (to keep me from being alarmed!) ‘This is the doctor!’ But I remember having been astonished since Dr Jones had silver-white hair. It was Gene, the male nurse. An enormous person, a former boxer, who could pick me up and put me down again like a sofa cushion.

The work was extremely difficult to play, he said, in fact almost impossible or at best only for three players of virtuoso rank; but, on the other hand, the music was very rewarding because of its extraordinary tonal effects.

It wasn’t until 1 October that my going to America became the kind of certainty I could believe in myself. Everything that appeared in the newspapers both before and since was founded on fantasy, just as are the purported ceremonies and the presence of ‘tout Paris’ at my so-called return to the Jewish faith. (tout Paris was, besides the rabbi and myself: my wife and a Dr Marianoff, with whom all these dreadful tales probably originated.) As you have surely observed, my return to the Jewish faith took place long ago and is even discernible in the published portions of my work (“Du sollst nicht…du musst…”)

1. The man is what he experiences; the artist experiences only what he is.
2. My inclinations developed more rapidly from the moment that I started to become clearly conscious of my aversions.

My targets were all those who seek their personal salvation by taking the middle course. For the middle course is the only one not leading to Rome. But it is taken by those who nibble at dissonances, wanting to pass for modern but are too cautious to draw to the consequences, consequences resulting not from the dissonances but also and even more so, from the consonances.

Oh, how happy your ‘Foreword’ made me, dearest esteemed friend. You really have finished off Krenek with this and with him half—what am I saying—9/10 of the U.E. catalogue!

I want to hurry answering this question, otherwise I shall get there too late, as happened with the Satires that I wrote four years ago about what was then current: they had scarcely been printed when they became obsolete, faster than anything else by me.