The meeting between the Streckers, Ulli Schultheiss, Peter Raabe and Goebbels is evidently invented, since Ulli is not real, but many of the arguments in it derive from the Streckers’ correspondence about the concerto, outlined in an in-depth study by Ann-Katrin Heimer published in the journal of the Hindemith Institute in Frankfurt-am-Main in 2002. Willy Strecker attended Jelly’s performance of the Mozart ‘Adelaide’ Concerto himself and subsequently helped to unearth the Schumann manuscript, and he did apparently organise a meeting with some powerful officials of the Reich to determine that Schott’s, not Breitkopf, should publish the concerto and to argue that Jelly should be accorded the moral right to the first UK performance.

It is possible that a serious rift took place between Jelly and Myra Hess; in Hess’s fullest biography by Marian McKenna, Jelly, the pianist’s duo partner for some 20 years, is mentioned only once, in passing. Nevertheless, when Hess started work on her National Gallery concerts during the Blitz, she devoted so much time to their organisation that apparently friendships often fell by the wayside. Their break may be as simple as that. Asked what went wrong, Jelly reputedly said only: ‘The war.’ The wonderful recording of the pair playing the Schubert Piano Trio No. 1 in B flat with the cellist Felix Salmond and the Brahms Piano Trio No. 3, Op. 87, with Gaspar Cassadó remains the only surviving memorial to their musical partnership.

A recording of Adila Fachiri and Tovey playing Beethoven’s Violin Sonata Op. 96 in G major is testament to the warmth, rigour and dedication of these two exceptional people. I doubt that my portrait of Tovey can begin to do justice to this towering musical mind, a man of complexity, great personal integrity and true ‘heart’.

Even though Jelly lost the concerto’s modern premiere to Kulenkampff, and some glory to Menuhin, and was even pipped to the post by the Jerusalem performance in January 1938, without her investigations it would have taken much longer for the work to re-emerge. It may not have been technically ‘lost’, but it still needed to be found. Along with the many magnificent pieces of music written for Jelly, its resurrection has helped to assure her immortality in the canon of great musicians of the 20th century.

Among the countless individuals I would like to thank are Jane Camilloni, John MacAuslan, Nigel Hess, Steven Isserlis, Lucy Cowan, John and David Gwilt, Rohan de Saram, Chris Latham, Peter and Chris Lockhart Smith and (posthumously) Margaret Lockhart Smith, Tully Potter, Sara Menguc, Fiona Lindsay, Sally Groves and Bernhard Pfau of Schott Music, Katy Bell and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Hungarian Cultural Centre London, David Le Page, Viv McLean, Philippe Graffin, Sir András Schiff, and my patient family, including my brother Michael and my long-suffering husband Tom. Profound apologies to anyone I may inadvertently have omitted. My deepest thanks, too, to the excellent team at Unbound and to everyone who has pledged support for the book.