Every opera-goer knows how, early in The Rake's Progress, that charming young loafer Tom Rakewell cries “I wish I had money!” and Shadow – Old Nick – ‘appears immediately at the garden gate’. Some months ago I was having a working lunch with Donald Mitchell and cried likewise, “I wish I had something on Paul Hamburger!” and – hey presto! – a book proposal arrived the next day from Leo Black with a chapter on the man himself. But there was a difference. I had wanted a Hamburger book to enrich my understanding of the émigré contribution to British musical life since the war – a project already under way with work many of us had done on Hans Keller and his circle. Yet rather than offer just ‘Hamburger’, Leo had included chapters on a host of other figures – and not just émigrés – who had helped mould the times. Some names, I must confess, were new to me – the ‘contents page’ alone was an education – and it was obvious I need look no further. Indeed, the limitation of my original wish had been put firmly in its place. It was as if, in his wisdom, Shadow had offered Tom not only money, but also a pocketful of ISAs, a Governmentbacked savings scheme and a final-salary pension scheme to boot.

Not that anything comes from nowhere. On 5 April 1995, Leo had followed up our first meeting – at the book-launch of Hans Keller's Essays on Music – with a letter about Schubert: he sensed a musical ‘unity’ to the great songs that ‘the non-German music-lover responds to’, especially in Abendröte. Would I have time, he wondered, to peruse his ‘sizeable’ essay on the subject? Peruse it I did, but in the great bustle of things, no more came of the matter. He was, in any case, proposing a monumental project that needed the support of a serious publisher, which in those days I wasn't: