Midday in a down-at-heel suburb of Berlin was not quite what Ulli had envisaged for the modern world premiere of the Schumann Violin Concerto. But Goebbels and the Reichsmusikkammer, together with the state’s leisure-time organisation Kraft durch Freude (KdF) – Strength through Joy – had developed some novel aims. They wanted to take music out of its concert halls and bring it to the people, in accessible venues that would not intimidate them with their formality and where tickets would be affordable for the ordinary man on the Charlottenburg tram. These concerts took a different form from mainstream events: the programmes were shorter, they might be held anywhere from a sports stadium to a factory, at lunchtime or in the afternoon, and they might involve not only music but recitations, political speeches and, occasionally, audience participation. The Violin Concerto was to take wing as part of this series, and as the centrepiece of a KdF conference; hence the opera house.

Eleven thirty: half an hour to go before his beloved concerto was to reach the world’s ears for the first time, and Ulli, fumbling to find his ticket and identity documents on the way in, halted in his tracks. Into this sizeable, usually welcoming foyer were filing not only audience members, but innumerable officials in uniform; two giant swastika flags decked the far wall, dominating the pale stone with scarlet, white and ebony. Barked instructions from security staff alarmed him; he tried not to show it. The personages of the Reich were on their way; everything else was subordinated to their security.

He kept his distance from the Streckers, who as the concerto’s publishers were expected to be accorded due recognition at some point. Ulli refused to put himself through another encounter with Goebbels. For all he knew, that man would be having his every step watched. He remembered the face of the minister of propaganda looming at him over that outsize table and felt sweat erupting on his forehead. ‘Nothing is ever “just a piece of music”… ’

‘Ach, Ulli,’ his mother had said at Sunday lunch, ‘you’re not yourself.’

‘I can’t sleep.’

‘You’re very pale and you don’t seem able to keep still for a minute. You must take care. You know you’re all I have left.’ She turned the thumbscrews of guilt, but of course it was true. Nothing had been the same since that meeting in Berlin, at which Ulli found himself on the edge of a ravine, staring into what might lie beneath.

Inside the auditorium he found his seat, glad to be near the back and not with his employers among the dignitaries. He could feel tension pervading the place as it filled: people sitting in silence or, if talking, chattering too hard, too fast or too quietly; fingers twitching across handbags or against sleeves, knuckles pallid, gazes darting up towards the largest box, which was festooned with the usual regalia, yet still empty and waiting.