Dovidl obviated all that. The first words he spoke put me in my place: a slave to his destiny. I was to be Sancho to his Don, the mashgiach to his Rosh, with no right of reprieve or parole. By flattering my intelligence, he had fooled me into thinking I was indispensable to him, a partner to his genius. I was, but only as Leporello is a partner to Don Giovanni’s exploits, vicariously and without corporeal pleasure. In truth, I was his dupe. He needed me so much, he made me his prisoner, his emasculated acolyte.

In every corner of my being, he shackled and disabled me. At school, I basked in his glory. At play, he led the way. At home he, not I, was the apple of my parents’ eyes. Nor could I even protest at my neglect. He was a genius, a tragic orphan. Only a heartless ingrate would have objected to helping him.

When his adolescence turned turbulent with grief and rage, his mode of rebellion denied me the right to rebel. Aware of my parents’ concern for his wellbeing, I could not burden them with any wildness on my part. I was forced into a pattern of obedience that persisted all my adult life, a coerced kind of fake compliance that sought evasions in marital infidelity in dingy railway hotels, destabilising my domestic contentment.

My dominator could not permit me the relief of sexual intimacy for fear it would allow me to escape his grip. So he screwed my first girlfriend, not because he especially wanted her but in order to keep me in a state of servile eunuchism. He left me no life to call my own. When he left altogether, he took with him the keys to my cell. I was incapable of initiating love or pursuing an ambition. I was reduced to sackcloth and ashes, unable to rise from an endless shiva, eviscerated of confidence. And all those years that I mourned the loss of my redeemer, I never once saw him as he really was: my devourer.

What he performed on me was a classic musical operation. It was the disempowerment that Richard Wagner practised on his acolyte Hans von Bülow, fucking his wife, Cosima, and forcing the sickly Tristan conductor to deny his own cuckolding before King Ludwig and the whole sniggering state of Bavaria. It was the enslavement that Arnold Schoenberg imposed on his pupils, Alban Berg and Anton von Webern, making them copy out his music instead of composing their own. It was the contempt that Mozart displayed for his fellow man, the scorn that Brahms heaped on his friends, the sinister way that Igor Stravinsky exploited everyone he ever touched.