Such a career had possessed him from childhood, and his slightly crazy mother had also thought of nothing else, pushing him under the nose of every eminent musician she could find in San Francisco, Pierre Monteux, Alfred Hertz, even Sergei Rachmaninoff once, as the maestro came off stage. His path had long been set. Yet he felt he was only beginning to understand what music needed.

Quacks and gurus were called in. He let Bernstein pour Scotch on it. The condition had a name, focal dystonia, and a cause, over-practising, but there was no cure. At times the fingers loosened, but nothing helped for long. And since music was his life, taking priority over everything including, to his regret, his first two wives and their children, he had to keep making it somehow. Pieces like the Brahms lay not only in his fingers but in his mind and heart, and his purpose, paraphrasing Beethoven’s inscription in the “Missa Solemnis”, was to communicate their power to other hearts. He just had to find alternative means of doing so. One was teaching.

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