14 OISEAUX DE PASSAGE Natalie told me ten years later, as we neared our hundredth concert, that my insistence, my patience, my conviction that only she could give Debussy a fresh and exciting interpretative slant, had got the better of her initial refusal. I had been mistaken in imagining she was filled with apprehension and snowed under by her operatic activities. Natalie wanted to be desired. And because I desired Natalie more than anything else in the world for this Debussy project, she opened the doors of her world of beauty to me.* *The foregoing paragraphs are excerpted from Philippe Cassard’s book Par petites touches (Paris: Mercure de France, 2022) and are reprinted by kind permission of the publisher
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTAwOTQx