First he extracted a fat volume entitled Life of Joachim, by Andreas Moser. He turned to the index; as Jelly watched, he fell still and his eyes brightened.

‘Ha! Jelly, look! First time lucky.’

Under the index heading SCHUMANN was an entry that said, clear as Scottish sunlight, VIOLIN CONCERTO IN D MINOR.

‘Schumann wrote to Joachim about it,’ Tovey said, reading rapidly. ‘So… yes, Jelly. It’s real. You’re very pale – are you all right?’

Jelly was silent. There, in print, was the confirmation she needed. She had been inwardly prepared for Tovey to continue declaring the whole story bunkum. Perhaps she’d hoped he would – because whatever was she to do about it now?

Tovey was following the trail. ‘It seems… yes, it was written for Joachim, naturally, and he gave a performance… Ah. Look, Jelly. A Schumann letter, written from the asylum at Endenich. It’s to Onkel Jo, saying he wishes he could have heard his performance of the D minor Concerto, quotes “which Clara speaks to me about so enthusiastically”.’

Jelly tried to summon her voice. ‘It wasn’t… quite real… before.’

‘Good. Now it is. Let’s see… ’

He spent a few minutes jotting notes, checking pages and staring thereafter into space. Jelly kept motionless for fear of disturbing him.

‘So, it’s from 1853,’ he said at last. ‘That does make it, as your critic friend suggested, a late work… Completed that October. Which, my dear, is exactly when he met Brahms for the first time. That gave him a boost – he was enchanted by this brilliant young man and his music.’

‘When was it that Schumann had his nervous breakdown?’

‘Five months later. He ran out of the house in his nightclothes one evening during carnival, threw his wedding ring into the Rhine and leapt in after it, apparently intending to drown himself. He was saved, but after that, he asked to be sent to the asylum.’

‘And the Violin Concerto?’

‘From the look of these,’ Tovey said, tapping the volumes in front of him, ‘our elusive concerto may have been the last big orchestral work he ever wrote.’

‘So – perhaps a flood of inspiration, and then a crash?’

‘Here’s something else.’ Tovey pored over a page, translating from the German. ‘There’s a letter here from Joachim to Moser, about the concerto… and – hmm. He doesn’t like it very much. He says it shows, and I quote, “a certain exhaustion, which attempts to wring out the last resources of spiritual energy”, though “certain individual passages bear witness to the deep feelings of the creative soul… ”’

‘But how can we know unless we can hear it?’

‘Precisely. It is only fair to Schumann that the work should be heard and assessed anew.’

‘Surely if Clara was “enthusiastic”, it can’t be one of those pieces she wanted to suppress, like that critic said.’