And think of the suffering families – the wives of Puccini, Janáček and Sibelius, the children of Liszt, Berlioz and Schumann, the damaged relics and offprints of the divinely endowed. They say the devil has the best tunes. Wrong: he has the lot. The greater the musician, the closer he communes with the source of evil. Managers in the music business have a reputation for toughness. Many of us start out as music lovers, but we grow an asbestos coating to protect us from the dragon’s flame that lurks within each and every maker of mellifluous noise (with the exception of cellists who are unusually gentle and accommodating). Ne tirez pas sur le pianiste, we are exhorted. On the contrary, it’s the pianist (violinist, conductor, composer) who deserves to get shot for the lives he wrecks. I ought to make a movie called Ne tirez pas sur le patron .

We managers stand unprotected in a rocket-pocked no man’s land, between giver and receiver of harmony. I got off lightly, hit by a minor comet, and am finally in the process of recovering. Perhaps I should set up a counselling service for survivors of musical abuse. I’ll apply to UNESCO for a grant and to Carnegie Hall for a first-aid room for victims of the sado-masochism that is central to the provision of serious music.

So what now? In place of fraternal love for the musician who stole my life I feel . . . not hate, but a growling resentment and a surge of self-assertion. I can now be me, come what may. Do I wish him dead? Not yet. There is unfinished business to be settled. The question that nags me midway through the second night is, what if? What if he had never turned up on that scorching August day in 1939? What if my life had run on unbroken rails? Would I want to have missed the thrill of bonding, the intimacy with music in the making, the time-stopping, spine-chilling thrill that I shall take with me to the grave? Or am I for ever in his debt for those gifts, paying an extreme price for a rare, illusory bliss?

In the grey self-accounting of a recovering insomniac, I am obliged to admit that I would not have missed a minute of it. What Dovidl brought was the revelation of intensity. He showed me that passion can invade dull lives, that my place on earth need not be suburban – so long as it is lit by a star. Even the mundane can be elevated, overturned, by a spontaneous burst of music. I cannot expunge that idea, nor would I wish to. It is a raison d’être that I have clung to through the empty years and one that must be reapplied in my age of triumphancy. I owe him something for that: I owe him the right to be left in peace, once the debt is settled.