‘There is such a thing in life as fair play,’ suggested Tovey. ‘Nobody would have been alerted to this manuscript if “our beautiful Hungarian’s” friend, the Swedish minister, had not gone to tremendous lengths to unearth it, using his intelligence and intuition to discover that it had been sitting all along in the wrong box. And he, and Adila, absolutely insist that Schumann’s own spirit selected Jelly as its representative.’

Ulli let out a swear word in German.

‘You could say “fiddlesticks”,’ remarked Tovey. ‘It’s not inappropriate. Nevertheless, Ulli, as you know, they believe it with all their hearts – and even I’m beginning to think there is some truth in it, one way or another. By the way, isn’t it worth remembering that if Breitkopf publishes that concerto, they stand to make a small fortune out of it? That should belong to Schott’s.’

The conversation at an end, Ulli sat, as was becoming his habit, with his hands over his eyes, breathing deeply. Of course the concerto should be Schott’s; of course he wanted Jelly to be the first violinist to play it. But Strecker’s enquiries had been making it increasingly clear that to assure either of these scenarios was going to require a gigantic fight, and the idea of having to do battle with representatives of this regime scarcely bore consideration… How had music become so entangled with politics anyway?

He had planned to spend the day on correspondence. It would have to wait. He called his secretary.

‘Fräulein Kammerling, please try and get Dr Strauss on the telephone for me.’

*

Richard Strauss, whom Ulli considered Germany’s greatest living composer, had for a short while run the regime’s music department, the Reichsmusikkammer: the committee that also decided which composers and performers should be officially sanctioned by the Nazi party. Ulli had been horrified, but it was not his place to object, merely to make sure that Strauss’s compositions were published on time. Strauss’s appointment nevertheless came to a swift end when officials intercepted a supportive letter from the composer to his Jewish librettist, the writer Stefan Zweig. Strauss was out on his tail and his name was mud. Word reached Ulli that Goebbels had demolished the unfortunate septuagenarian in a final meeting, screaming at him that he was a nobody and would never, ever write music as fine as Franz Lehár’s, leaving him shaking and tearful on the stairs at the Ministry of Propaganda. Strauss insisted that they’d never asked him to take the post, merely ordered him, and the alacrity with which they’d thrown him out said more about the composer’s true self, Ulli decided, than the fact that he had felt obliged to do the job at all.