The heart of this program is a song that won’t be sung. When Schubert wrote his ‘Death and the Maiden’ it was ‘just’ a deliciously morbid song by a 20-year-old Romantic. By the time he transformed it for the slow movement of his D minor string quartet he was facing the spectre of syphilis – death was all too real. The quartet is gloomy and impassioned, with every movement in a minor key, and listening to it is a cathartic experience – the musical equivalent of Titanic and a box of tissues.

Maddalena Lombardini was a product of the Venetian orphanage-music schools where musicians such as Vivaldi had composed and taught. Her teachers included the violinist Tartini, and after marrying another violinist she toured Europe before arriving in London, where she met Johann Christian Bach and became popular as the ‘celebrated Mrs Lombardini Sirmen’.

This musical pairing, says Jessica Cottis, embraces the struggle between hope and despair as we contemplate our own mortality.