It was nearly midnight, after a recording session that had lasted all day and well into the evening; the pressure on young Yehudi had scarcely let up. Compared to the world tour he was completing, it was probably easy. He’d been to South America, South Africa, India, Singapore and all the way to Australia. But not Germany. Back in 1933, before anyone had had time to ban Jewish musicians, he had taken the initiative and declared he would not play there as long as Hitler held power.

Ulli had come to the studio for most of the afternoon, capitalising on the chance to see Menuhin at work, close to, from the control room. What a face he had: fine brows, almond-shaped eyes, a patrician nose. His skin hadn’t yet lost the glow of boyhood, and his smooth hair shone gold in the studio lights. His violin not only sang, but spoke. This marvel might not help them to winkle the Schumann concerto out of the library, but if they managed to winkle it and he were then to champion it, he could make the piece as famous as he was himself, anywhere in the world beyond Germany – most particularly in America – along with any of Schott’s other violin concertos that he happened to like.

Since the head of the Reichsmusikkammer had changed – it used to be Richard Strauss – a blacklist had been brought in that banned the music of Jewish composers. This hit their publishers squarely in the pocket: in Germany no sheet music could be sold, no orchestral parts hired out for concerts. Schott had relatively few Jewish composers on their roster: Ernst Toch, Erich Wolfgang Korngold from Vienna and Mátyás Seiber from Hungary, but not many others. It seemed, though, that the biggest worry was not the immediate effect, but how much worse the future might be. ‘Once people start banning things, it can be difficult to know when to stop,’ Willy warned. Therefore they had to shore up their resources. There was, after all, an outside world, as he had said; and Yehudi was the young musical king of it.

Poor boy: fancy having to be known these days by the very name from which the term ‘Jew’ was derived. Moshe explained to the gathering that when he and his wife, Marutha, were looking for lodgings in New York they were welcomed by a landlady who misidentified Marutha by her blue eyes and declared she’d rent them the room because she did not want Jewish tenants. Marching away, Yehudi’s mother-to-be chose the name of her unborn son in fury. At least, she vowed, nobody could ever take Yehudi to be something or someone he was not.