And that settled it. Arriving home, Dovidl and I repaired to the piano room and planned a curriculum. Flesch had left him a guide to the repertoire, so we knew what had to be covered, Bach to Alban Berg. The structure was left to us, with weekly nudges from Dr Hermann Steiner, who received us on Wednesday evenings with bitter coffee and dentally ruinous cakes. ‘So good of you to visit an old man,’ he would say, as his aged wife, slightly demented from exile and loss, scuttled among the cups and saucers. Huddled in front of a single-bar gas heater in a Carlton Hill attic room Steiner, in a frayed grey cardigan, dazzled us with tales of Nordic heroes, anecdotes of Einstein and his violin, an analysis of quantum theory, an appreciation of the Elgin Marbles, which he admired above all modern sculpture, an account of Max Reinhardt’s Salzburg festival, and a wealth of musical encounters. How he had met Brahms on a bicycle; how his father had known a doctor whose father had treated Beethoven for gout; how Gustav Mahler had appreciated his leadership of the Leipzig orchestra. Dr Steiner was, to educated British eyes, an alien from outer space: an intellectually rounded man whose mind-world knew no borders or limitations.

I did not warm to his sagas (or believe for one moment the story of Beethoven’s pet cat and the Kreutzer Sonata), but listening to the old man talk affected the way Dovidl played. How, exactly, I as a non-musician cannot explain, but Dovidl’s tone deepened and he gave an impression of having more to convey than well-practised repetition. Just as the best conductors imprint their personality upon an orchestra, so Dr Steiner transferred something of his cultural identity to Dovidl. It bypassed me for, while I absorbed knowledge from the old man, my character was unaltered. But Dovidl grew artistically from the exposure, as well as technically from the specific digital guidance that Dr Steiner was able to give for the fingering of intractable passages. Theirs was an artistic transaction, a spiritual transmission, artist to artist. I felt, for the first time, entirely excluded from Dovidl’s world. ‘Mein Kind,’ said Dr Steiner, seeing my face drop, ‘do not be sad. Every artist needs a personal auditor, a pair of ears he can always trust. You will be his listener, the post on which he measures his progress.’