Péter Nádas

When I came home after three years of teaching in America it was 1973. I had visited interesting schools abroad and particular points of pedagogy were bursting from my fingertips. At that time, Péter Nádas was working for “Gyermekünk” (Our Child) magazine and somehow we found each other. “Gyermekünk” magazine published my writings. I wrote about the freedom of the soul, the self-expression of children and open classes. Péter Nádas went through my unkempt articles and encouraged me until I wrote up my experiences in a volume. I continued to write many-many pages after which Péter arranged the entire pile to become a book. I am not a writer, I am a teacher. But I have so much to say about children that I must write about them with the music as well. Péter taught me how to write so that my writings would find a shape.

Years passed and Péter Nádas’s name became known in the world. I would have been ashamed of bothering him in his distant, creative solitude but because my favourite film was not well received at home I wrote to him requesting for him to please watch it if he ever got to Pest. In the film Duende, my Italian and Hungarian students are dancing in Ravenna to the musical compositions of Bach and Händel. They are dancing and painting outdoors, on the seaside, in water, among trees and under the pictures of the Roman San Vitale’s mosaics. Péter did come and watch film and while watching it, he did not ask anything. He was paying attention and he could immediately understand it better than anybody else. During the next years I remembered this experience whenever I was misunderstood.

Then my book, Joy, Through the Magic of Music was ready. Its English translator, Ágnes Péter encouraged me to ask Péter Nádas to write a foreword so I asked him. He immediately answered and asked for the manuscript. Three days later he told me that he would send the foreword and the manuscript, in which he marked the un-Hungarian or wrong expressions. Yes, he read the manuscript so carefully. He pays attention out of love.

The sum of my in-progress writings and films is another struggle in my life.
What kind of picture will fit for the writings, the hundreds of drawings and paintings, of my students and of my memory of it all? I said I would like the picture of a tree. We could put our topics on the branches of the tree. My friend Ági suggests, “Ask Péter Nádas for his pear tree pictures. I have seen them in an exhibition, they are beautiful.”

He had taken pictures of the pear tree for a year. Which picture might I pick? He allows me to choose. 
I would like a spring tree, one about to blossom weighed down with buds. It is as if Péter Nádas is the budding pear tree so ready to blossom with his help again.