It was several years since Jelly had last seen Elisabeth; approaching the villa she had a brief attack of nerves. The inhabitants of Hurricane House, fond though they were of their cousin, couldn’t help wondering whether she entirely approved of them, for here in the heart of establishment academia, where Harold was admired for his writings on idealism and the ‘coherence of truth’, Elisabeth had developed a hint of her father’s piercing gaze.

Her welcome, though, was warm as can be, complete with scones, jam and clotted cream. Soon Jelly, sipping from the family china, was happily filling her in on the gossip from London and the way that Adila’s teaching, modelled on Joachim’s, was making such a difference to young Madge. They chatted about Tovey, the music societies, the students, the Proms, until finally Elisabeth said, ‘Jelly, it’s very unlike you to turn up needing to talk about something and then not talk about it. What’s happened? Is there news of the concerto?’ Jelly had told her the basics when she telephoned to arrange the visit and Elisabeth professed herself amazed.

‘Read this.’ From her handbag Jelly drew a small envelope containing two thin sheets of paper, sent from Interlaken.

Perusing them, Elisabeth grew very still. ‘Never?’

‘That’s what she says. Never. It should never, ever be played. Lisa, this is horrible. Can you believe that there is a concerto by Schumann, but his daughter insists we are never, ever to be allowed to play and hear it? I can understand a hundred-year ban, perhaps, but… ’

Eugenie Schumann had other ideas. Although she could have been no more than 5 years old when her father died, and was now 82, she declared her memory vivid. The decision to put the concerto aside, she wrote, was her mother’s alone, not Joachim’s. Clara, she insisted, had taken years to determine what to do about it, discussed it at length with Brahms and Joachim and had even asked the latter to create a new finale for the work, as she considered Schumann’s defective. She had made it clear to her children that the concerto contained traces of his final illness.

‘I shall never forget the instant in our home at Frankfurt-on-Main,’ Eugenie wrote, ‘when my mother came in to us and said, with deep but suppressed feelings visible in her face: “I have just agreed with Joachim and Brahms that the concerto shall not be published, not now nor at any time. We are entirely in accord on the matter.”’ She went on to speculate on the anguish, responsibility and courage that must have been entailed in making that decision, inspired, she insisted, by the triumvirate’s love for, and faithfulness to, Schumann’s memory and their desire to show him only at his best.