Phèdre of Racine, set in Rome in the nineteenth century and with the characters speaking romagnolo and the music consisting of popular tunes of the 1920s. I played polo with the English aristocracy and with the jumped-up sons of brewers. To tell you the truth, Massimo, he said, as he motioned with his stick and I picked up another pair of shoes and added them to the pile in the box, I was bored. Unhappy and bored. I arranged to have my opera put on, but the English musical establishment, the most conservative musical establishment in the world, turned up their noses at it. All apart from the Sitwells and Lord Berners. It was then I decided to go to Vienna and seek out Schoenberg or one of his pupils. I was tired of frivolity, Massimo, he said. I was twenty-six years old and I needed to go down into the heart of music, to find something that was more than glitter and cynical humour. Over my dead body, my wife said. She was a dreadful linguist, like all the English, and the thought of living in Vienna terrified her. Besides, she had a stream of lovers or perhaps they were only admirers. I do not think she was interested enough in sex to have a stream of lovers, so it was probably a stream of admirers, whom she would have been loath to leave. So I went on my own. I found a flat next door to the opera house and I set about finding the best teacher I could. Arabella wrote me a letter a week, sheet after sheet in her childish hand, telling me about all the balls and race meetings she had been to and sailing at cows and cricket with the lords and shooting in the Highlands on weekends in this grand house and that, with this lover or admirer or that. Thursday mornings, that was the day these letters arrived, these extraordinary missives, which seemed to have been written by someone who had never heard of censorship or revision, she wrote in exactly the same way of her premenstrual pains, she had always been given to premenstrual pains, as of her dinner parties, of her constipation as of the golden down on the arm of the latest young man to fall in love with her. It would take me a week to read through these letters. I had only just got to the end of one when the next one arrived. What I felt was that she was living for both of us and so I could take a break from living and concentrate on music. But Scheler was a big disappointment. At first I thought it was my fault, he said, then I thought that perhaps I had chosen the wrong teacher, but the more I talked to the musicians of Vienna the more I realised they were all infected with this intellectual disease. They were all obsessed with reason and analysis, with words like Necessity and Truth. The best of them, like Schoenberg and Berg, used this as a way of harnessing their hysterical emotion. Because they were all hysterics. Jewish hysterics. Even when they were not Jews, like Webern, who was the best of them, they were infected with the Jewish hysteria. At the same time the papers were like buckets full of excrement, Massimo, he said, you have no idea of the way Jews were vilified in a so-called centre of world civilisation like Vienna, it was not surprising they felt they needed to retreat into Reason and Science. Only that which was reasonable and that which was scientific would release them from the smells that came up from the sewers of Vienna. It was not a place to be, Massimo, he said, if you were Italian, if you were Sicilian. Arabella had been right not to wish to come with me, Massimo, he said. When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 it got even worse. I did not want to have anything to do with people like Scheler and even with Schoenberg, he said, I did not want to have anything to do with Viennese intellectuals and artists, all suicides, actual and potential, and I did not want to have anything to do with Hitler and his Viennese disciples or with Mussolini and his thugs. So I returned to London. But London no longer satisfied me, he said. The Court of St James no longer satisfied me. Oysters at Wheeler’s and weekends in the country no longer satisfied me. I decided to settle in Paris, still a civilised city in the midst of all this excrement. But before we could move Arabella disappeared again. I made enquiries and found that she had taken herself off to New York. In these situations, Massimo, he said, it is essential to act decisively. I took the next boat for New York. I had a loaded pistol in my pocket. I am not sure whether I intended to shoot her or to shoot myself in front of her. In the event I tracked her down to a hotel in Greenwich Village and sat there in the bar drinking and waiting for her to come in. After a long time a man came up to me and asked if I was the Italian lord. I said yes. A lady would like to see you, he said. What kind of a lady? I asked. A lady, he said, and gave me the key to a room. I went upstairs. I had the gun in the pocket of my jacket and I kept one hand on it. With the other I inserted the key the man had given me into the lock. It was very quiet in the hotel, four o’clock in the afternoon. The door to the bedroom was open and I walked across the thick carpet and stood in the doorway. The curtains were drawn, but there was just enough light to see by. She was lying on the bed with her face to the wall. I stood for a long time by the door, looking. Finally I walked across and sat down on the bed beside her. Neither of us said a word. A long time passed. It grew dark but we stayed on like that. Then she turned over and opened her eyes and looked at me. She had eyes like no one else, Massimo, he said. Violet eyes. Like no one else. The return journey across the Atlantic was our veritable honeymoon, Massimo, he said. We were closer then than at any other time. Closer than we would ever be again. So we moved to Paris and I met Jouve and Eluard and Michaux and all the rest of them and began to write poetry in French. But I was lost, Massimo, he said, lost. I didn’t want to spend my life writing waltzes of the kind I had written in Monte Carlo, amusing as those had been to write, and I didn’t want to write the sorts of serial compositions Scheler had been trying to get me to write. But beyond that I knew nothing. And then things got very bad in Europe. It was impossible to stay in Paris and there was no question of moving back to Rome, so we went to Switzerland, three days before the war broke out. At least in Switzerland you could leave the shouting behind and try to lead a civilised life. But you cannot lead a civilised life when you know what is happening all around you. You can take walks in the mountains and breathe in the good air, but you cannot shut out reality. Had I been able to write music I might have done so, he said. But I could no longer write. I sat at my piano and I played the same note, over and over again, hour after hour, the same note. Arabella begged me to stop but I could not leave the piano alone and I could not play anything except that one note. So in order to spare her I signed myself in to a sanatorium. My health was very bad anyway, and I thought, Europe is a madhouse, so the only way to stay sane is to enter a madhouse. Because these Swiss sanatoria are all madhouses, Massimo, he said. Believe me, he said, I tried dozens of them. All madhouses. The doctors are mad and the nurses are mad and the patients are mad. In one of them I led a revolt of the patients against the management. We were being treated like vermin even though we were paying through the nose, and I decided a stand must be taken. We took the senior doctor hostage, a madman called Schweinsteiger, and we locked him in a dark room until the management acceded to our requests. In another I organised a music festival, he said. I formed a choir and I taught them how to make various animal sounds and we put all those together and a rather interesting piece of music emerged. We all enjoyed ourselves thoroughly and the patients who took part immediately got better, but when we performed it in public for the other patients and the doctors and nurses they booed us so loudly we had to stop. However, all the performers discharged themselves the next day, their symptoms had entirely disappeared. I stayed on because I preferred to be inside than outside, but everyone blamed me for the concert and the management blamed me for persuading the performers that they were cured. It was then I realised, Massimo, he said, that there is no such thing as informed listening to music, there is only prejudice and the absence of prejudice. Why are the sounds of twenty-eight animals all barking and braying and mooing and hooting in concert any less beautiful than Bach’s B Minor Mass or the last movement of the Ninth Symphony? Tell me that, Massimo, he said, tell me that and I will give you a doctorate in music.