Their father ran a sausage business, successful enough for Anton to follow Gerhard in due course to the Gymnasium and sit with the other little scholars, their backs aching, their eyes strained by the dim light. Friedrich’s family was also in trade, but their timber business was a hundred years old and carried the air of noble forests – unlike the sausage factory, with its daily deliveries from the slaughterhouse. Friedrich, who was fair-haired and taller than Anton, seemed to glide over the surface of the world, knowing the right way to greet a friend of his parents in the street or what to tip a porter. Anton hoped that by walking with him, invariably half a step behind, he might catch something of the grace he lacked.

There was not much in the school curriculum to hold their attention. The days were long, the teaching uninspired; there was no understanding of the need for activity or adventure. A ten-minute break in a corridor was all that was on offer before they resumed their places, two by two, on the wooden benches in the schoolroom. In winter, the hours were extended by the blue light of gas jets; in summer the windows were covered so that the sunlit outdoor life could not distract them from learning.

After lessons, Anton and Friedrich would walk home down the Bahnhofstrasse, talking furiously as they looped through the smarter districts where families had lived in the same houses for three generations. They had laughed at the lack of intellectual curiosity they imagined behind the high railings and double front doors, from where they could hear the sound of piano scales, practised by the daughter of the house in the dying light of a winter afternoon. They swore to one another that they would never descend to such an existence.

Throughout the eight years of school, Anton assumed he would go on to the university in Vienna, then make his life there. To settle anywhere else, he and Friedrich agreed, would make it seem as though they were in some way joking; and, as he discovered within a day of his arrival, Vienna was nothing if not serious. Almost every building was a palace or a concert hall or a ministry. He wondered where the poor people lived; there seemed to be no simple lodgings, no slums or tenements to break up the imperial vistas, with the archduke processing each morning between palaces in his horse-drawn carriage.

The city saw itself as the centre of civilisation. From the excitement with which people spoke about them, it was as though they still expected Beethoven or Haydn to show up any day at the Esterhazys’ town house for an impromptu performance. People boasted about how, when the old Burgtheater was to be dismantled and rebuilt, they had been among the audience who refused to leave until they could take away a splinter of the stage in their pockets. Not himself much interested in music, Anton found it hard not to laugh when even the fishmonger offered a critique of the brass band as he strolled in the Prater with his wife on a Sunday afternoon.