On a recursive inverse eigenvalue problem

Let s ₁, ..., s _n be arbitrary complex scalars. It is required to construct an n × n normal matrix A such that s _i is an eigenvalue of the leading principal submatrix A _i , i = 1, 2, ..., n. It is shown that, along with the obvious diagonal solution diag(s ₁, ..., s _n ), this problem always admits a much more interesting nondiagonal solution A. As a rule, this solution is a dense matrix; with the diagonal solution, it shares the property that each submatrix A _i is itself a normal matrix, which implies interesting connections between the spectra of the neighboring submatrices A _i and A _{i + 1}.