This is by no means a textbook, and at most a book to be read for pleasure. In it I have captured some of my experiences while exploring the wonderful world of music. These began when I was about six years old, and my parents gave me an old record player with a few 78 rpm discs. As far as I can remember, these were some Beethoven violin sonatas played by Yehudi and Hepzibah Menuhin, a few of Max Reger's sonatinas with the Dutch pianist Cor de Groot, and Safford Cape with the Belgian Pro Musica Antiqua performing works by Guillaume de Machaut. Apparently my parents were of the opinion that this was a good first selection for a child of six, and indeed, perhaps they unwittingly shaped part of my future. As a teenager I was allowed to sit next to Hepzibah Menuhin to turn pages for her, and as a student I did extensive research on Max Reger and his Dutch contacts for one of my final theses. To this day I am fascinated by developments in the performance of early music, even though my own expertise is based more around 1600 than 1350.

In the same year that I was given the record player and during a hot summer, our opposite neighbour died. She was Alice Heksch, a well-known pianist and one of the first Mozart specialists on the fortepiano, though I knew nothing about that at the time. As far as I was concerned, she was the mother of three somewhat older children, who were often in our house that summer. Their father was the violinist Nap de Klijn. The room in which Alice Heksch lay ill was shielded from the hot summer sun by a yellow curtain that moved gently in the breeze. That summer my parents also played me a long-playing record, Mozart raconté aux enfants, on which Mozart's life was narrated by Gérard Philipe, a famous French actor who had died at a young age. This told of Mozart's journey to Paris, where his mother died in 1778, the sad moment unfolding to the first part of Mozart's Piano Sonata in A minor. How heartbreaking could you make things for a child?