Three days before 11/11/11. Three days before his 70th birthday. Before the child prodigy’s first public piano concert—one he’d been rehearsing, in a way, all his life—came a leukemia diagnosis. After three transfusions, Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition slipped elegantly into a black-walled living room overlooking New York’s Central Park before dozens of friends. Tony’s decades delay for bucking his father’s rule: no practice, no supper; when my friends come by you come play, coppice. Tony rebelled. Finally. Became an accomplished psychiatrist—helping others find their way, as he found his.

Retired, he dusted off his inherited ebony grand, practiced for hours and hours under Seymour Bernstein’s—Juilliard’s/America’s best teacher—watchful guidance. Caresses and thunderings from that day still echo for some of us. Seymour’s tutelage included, which of six modulated tones each of eighty eight keys a down-stroke might yield.

Years after Tony’s triple eleven triumph, he kept going. Enduring the chemo slowing
the white avalanche inside him, he produced an award-winning documentary to honor Seymour’s melodic playing, teaching, composing. He created a series of home concerts for other—younger—prodigies bringing more glorious peonies of sound into his living room.

Tony’s melody of friendship is deepest I ever experienced. It began when Tony met my dog Emma and declared I love animals more than people. A lie it turned out, because
as a smorgasbord of evidence testifies, Tony had a vast capacity to come close—heart
to heart—with wildly different members of our human tribe: the certifiable neighbor
on the spectrum; the abandoned daughter of a mafiosi don; the ninety-year-old homeless atheist invited into his home, listened to, and fed.