Dimitrie cantemir was an unlikely toiler in the music-exploring vineyard. Born in 1673, he was the son of a minor noble in the principality of Moldavia: that little Balkan state, now divided among Romania, Moldova, and the Ukraine, was then plagued by marauding Tartars, rapacious boyars, and by the annual extortion of money and labour by the Ottoman Empire, to which Moldavia was a vassal state. When Dimitrie was twelve his father was appointed Prince of Moldavia: the downside to this was that, following tradition, one of the prince’s sons had to live permanently under guard in Constantinople, as a guarantee that Moldavia would not rebel against the Ottoman yoke.

First Dimitrie’s elder brother was the hostage, then it became sixteen-year-old Dimitrie’s turn. But he got on so well with his Turkish captors that he was soon able to exchange his hostage status for that of a diplomatic envoy. Constantinople was at that time the heart of Islam, and a cultural melting pot; Christians were made welcome and allotted their own sector of the city, and Dimitrie was allowed to roam wherever he wanted. As he was a polyglot polymath, that meant the freedom to roam through the city’s libraries, including the one at the Grand Seraglio which was normally forbidden to non-Muslims, and he studied there for twenty years. His writings in Latin, Turkish, and French covered subjects ranging from science, philosophy, and Greek-Orthodox mysticism to cartography, Peter the Great’s Russia, and the decline of the Ottoman Empire, about which his forecasts were prophetic. He became renowned across Europe as a political commentator, and his admirers included Gibbon, Burke, Byron, and Victor Hugo; his claim to be of Tartar descent provoked Voltaire to declare that the multiplicity of his talents suggested he must have been descended ‘from the race of Pericles, rather than that of Tamburlaine’. His son recorded his austere daily routine: rising at five, smoking a pipe over a bowl of coffee, studying till midday and then, after lunch and a siesta, working on until seven in the evening.

But Dimitrie was also a musician, and he fell in love with the sound of the long-necked tanbur lute, which in his view ‘flawlessly reproduced’ the flow of the human voice when bowed, and had a particular expressiveness when plucked.