Like many friends of Kodály, I find myself having to grapple with a sense of being stricken beyond comfort, and a warring disbelief that he is dead at all. Scattered all over the world is a body of people who have felt the personal magnetism of this extraordinary man, and whose lives have been radically changed as a result. Mátyás Seiber eloquently described the ‘peculiar, suggestive, compelling force that issues from him’, and how his teaching was invested with a touch of Buddhism, which forced his pupils to redeem themselves. That power is no less operative now that he is dead; it is if anything intensified, and people who have been aware of his standards find themselves impelled to take up the challenge that they represent.