Legend has it that Hans Swarowsky was the illegitimate son of a Habsburg archduchess, who had gone to Budapest to deliver, in an attempt to avoid scandal back home. An attractive tabloid story, probably without a grain of truth. The fact is that Hans Swarowsky was born in the Hungarian capital.

That was where I met and interviewed him in 1974. He was conducting a concert and I attended one of his rehearsals. I can vividly recall him standing in front of the orchestra, an elderly, stocky gentleman in shirtsleeves, wearing braces, moving his right arm with mechanical regularity up and down, up and down. The music, whatever it may have been, sounded desperately dull.

Still, I was keen to talk to the man who was by then something of a legend, with Zubin Mehta and Claudio Abbado among his pupils. Also two young Hungarian conductors, the brothers Ádám and Iván Fischer.

Interviewing Swarowsky took some chutzpah (or lack of self-criticism), for my German was very poor indeed. What I did not realize at the time but am painfully aware of nearly forty years on, was my naiveté in holding my microphone to the mouth of a man, born in 1899, who had been an adult during the last war. It never occurred to me to question, at least in my mind, what it actually meant when he said he had left Switzerland to take up a position in Germany.