Prima la musica (‘first the music’) has always been the watchword of the conductor Sir Antonio Pappano; the words, and the ego, come second. Even so, throughout this carefully crafted memoir Pappano writes naturally and candidly. He’s clearly pleased about the ‘Sir’ – his predecessor as music director of the Royal Opera, Bernard Haitink, brushed it aside – and proud of having recently conducted much of the music at the funeral of the late queen at Westminster Abbey, so close to the Peabody Estate flat where he spent part of his childhood.

Pappano’s background is surely unique among conductors. His parents were hard-working, music-loving immigrants from Castelfranco in Miscano, a southern Italian village to which he has recently returned to perform. Pappano himself was born in Epping in 1959, after his parents had moved to Britain, where his father turned first to singing and then to teaching singing as a living. Unlike most conductors, he never went to music college. He got most of his musical education from accompanying his father’s singing students on the piano. You believe him when he writes that ‘this book is being written from the perspective of someone wanting to emulate my parents, maintaining through perseverance, curiosity and plain hard work their vision of what progress and achievement could be, no matter how humble the beginnings’.

The story of Pappano’s trajectory from accompanist in Britain and then America to repetiteur and finally, with the encouragement of the Swedish soprano Inga Nielsen – ‘you play the piano like an orchestra, you have to conduct,’ she told him – the podium makes for compelling reading. But at the