The Gáls walked away across the square with their two sons, avoiding the streetlights, heads down, dark hats and scarves all but concealing their faces; with a fearful lurch he wondered when he might ever see them again. He shut himself inside the cloakroom for a few minutes so that his boss would not witness his emotions getting the better of him.

He had seen it approaching, yet he didn’t want to believe it. It had been baking at the back of the Depression’s oven for years. The new recipe of this nationalist cake – thick textured and full of nuts, Ulli thought – lured disaffected young people who couldn’t find jobs, since there were none to be had; it seemed aromatic, too, for older folk who’d blame anyone but the government and world finances for what was going on: immigrants, Jews, Gypsies, sodomites, and anybody who dared to ask too many questions.

Ulli could easily have been part of that. His father never came back from Ypres, and he still recalled the anguish of mortification when he arrived at school during the war in a blazer three sizes too small, lightheaded and nauseous because there was no breakfast to eat, nor any lunch to look forward to. He thanked God, and his mother, for his music; in contact with the piano keys and the spirits of Beethoven, Bach or Schumann, he felt the world’s madness give way to beauty, inspiration and order, while the music lasted. He wished to serve that beauty, inspiration and order; now working for Schott gave him the chance to do so. And so the Streckers, and Ulli with them, watched, waited and fought what corners were theirs to fight; namely, those of the composers whose works they published.

Each morning Ulli bicycled to the office from his flat on the outskirts of Mainz – a small apartment with a living room occupied mainly by his Bechstein piano. He would ride along by the river Rhine, past the dusky pink stone of the ancient cathedral and into the medieval streets of the town centre, cobbles under his wheels, oak-beamed façades around him – as pretty as a set for Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, which Schott published, and as German as one for Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which Schott also published. On the Weihergarten he left his bike outside the building, then unlocked the heavy wooden door that led to the main staircase between the street and the courtyard. There in the hall he found himself face to face with Richard Wagner.