Musicologists are sometimes reproached for being interested only in the music that lies outside the normal répertoire. Against the reproach they have numerous sound lines of defence: that the ‘normal répertoire’ covers a relatively small range, that their work helps materially to widen that range, and so on. All the same, there is (I think) a general and quite natural tendency on the part of scholars to neglect the very familiar composers, to assume that we already know all that is worth knowing about the music of, for instance, Schumann and Mendelssohn and Chopin, Dvorak and Tchaikovsky. There may, they feel, still be some gleaning to do but the main harvest has already been gathered in. It is perhaps a natural assumption but it is a quite false assumption.