His music exhibits a gigantic humanity coupled with acutely empathic intelligence. For various reasons the Proms offering of West Side Story had to be what is known as a ‘concert performance’ rather than a full staging. And perhaps it was this – the work stripped bare of its phenomenal Jerome Robbins choreography and Arthur Laurents book, allowing Bernstein’s music and Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics to shine apart – that made me hear, thunderstruck, this overfamiliar moment from Act 2 entirely anew:

When love comes so strong

There is no right or wrong

Your love is your life

A few weeks previously I’d watched weeping as somebody close to me wed his beloved long-term girlfriend. He happens to be a Welsh boy of no particular faith. She happens to be a Muslim girl from Karachi via Britain. After years of deliberating about what they should do, of waiting and wondering, of attempting to pave the way for a shared future, they had decided the time was now: they wanted to be together forever. Your love, after all, is your life. Despite her best efforts to reconcile her family to her relationship, at the news of her engagement her father had immediately cut her off: there was not a single member of her enormous extended family to watch her walk down that aisle. It was a beautiful summer day tinged with sadness – and, it felt to me, madness.