His brief trips to Germany had decided Dent on staying the first six months in Dresden, where there was a large and flourishing English colony he knew would welcome him, thanks to the essential letters of introduction furnished by Charles Sayle, Sedley Taylor, and his own family connections. His small independent income went much further abroad, but the idea of being so unencumbered had not quite sunk in yet: Dent was still enough of an inexperienced and nervous traveller to find such a conventional safety-net necessary, furnished with credentials he did not yet scorn, clothed in the remnants of his conventional upbringing.

It had started extremely well the first week in October 1899, with Dent joining Sedley Taylor and Hugh Allen at the chamber music festival in Meiningen, about 50 miles (80 km) west of Dresden. On the boat crossing the Channel, Dent had already met up with Donald Tovey again, who performed his ‘Bad Child’s Book of Beasts’ on the boat’s piano, ‘exquisitely funny, especially as he played & sang them’. Meiningen was all that was civilised in Germany at the time, with a fairytale castle, Rembrandts in the local galleries and a serious music festival at its heart; Brahms had fallen in love with it and spent much of his declining years there. For Dent it was a revelation, with the Joachim Quartet playing Beethoven’s String Quartet op. 131, ‘which I confess is beyond me – except in some places’, and Richard Muhlfeld playing clarinet in the trio written for him by Brahms, but most importantly, music-making of the highest order as part of the fabric of the place, with intelligent audiences and the company of friends. He loved it all. There was the Schubert C major Quintet, the Schumann A major Quartet, the Brahms B flat Sextet: ‘an ideal performance – though rather long’.