It gathered force as the 18th century wore to its end, the turn towards autumn, evening and longing, and it flowed into all the arts. In his green-walled study on the edge of the Ilm Park in Weimar, Goethe wrote ‘An den Mond’ (1777): moonlight, silence and memory filling the receptive heart. On warm nights he slept out under the stars. Painters, aided by new synthetic pigments (cobalt blue was first available commercially about 1806), turned to seashores by moonlight, to townscapes with lamplit windows. Caspar David Friedrich, at the heart of a circle of Dresden Romanticists, organised multimedia performances where moonlight transparencies (translucent paintings) were exhibited with changing light effects and musical accompaniment. And in Russia, John Field (1782–1837), a Dublin-born virtuoso pianist with a gift for subtle playing and drawing a singing tone from the piano, took advantage of the newly perfected sustaining pedal and invented what he called nocturnes: reflective keyboard pieces in which a moving accompaniment sustained a singing melodic line. Field spent his evenings and nights with curtainless windows, composing, drinking and watching the falling snow, which you can all but hear in his music.

Field is the first hero of Susan Tomes’s beguiling book about nocturnes as a phenomenon and, more generally, music that inhabits evening and night. Field’s Russian experience was crucial, she suggests; his Nocturnes evoke not only stars and snow but also the ‘white’ nights of the summer in St Petersburg. She draws a strong distinction between the lively 18th-century party music called Nachtmusik (played at evening gatherings) and the crepuscular nocturne (usually for solo piano), which is the main subject of the greater part of this book.

The central tradition passed from Field to Chopin and then on to Gabriel Fauré, and Tomes maps the echoes and influences that flowed between these composers. There are wonderful accounts of Field’s quiet, compelling performances, and of Chopin’s rhythm ‘vacillating like a flame … [or] like corn in the field