Percy Grainger may have been one of the first song collectors to make live recordings, but that wasn’t the reason for his worldwide fame, nor is it the principal reason why he is remembered today. His virtuoso pianism, admired by Ferruccio Busoni and Leopold Stokowski, made him a celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic; his wild onstage behaviour – vaulting over the piano, running round the auditorium during the orchestral sections of a concerto – simply added to his allure. Meanwhile the scintillating arrangements of folk song which he ‘dished up’ (his phrase) for solo piano, or for any ensemble to hand, would have made him rich, had he not given so much money to charity and needy friends; his arrangement of ‘Country Gardens’, which he and Cecil Sharp collected in 1908, became a show-stopper which is still often played as an encore.

Despite the exuberant colour of his orchestral works, he wasn’t a major composer. But he was a major musical revolutionary, born out of his time: his belief in music as a democratic force transcending nationality and culture, and his championing of a ‘free music’ which could burst asunder restraining conventions, would have earned him an honoured place among the avant-garde today. But his sexual proclivities, combined with his startlingly un-PC views about race, won him notoriety. The straitlaced view among ethnomusicologists is that those proclivities had a disastrous effect on his work. But it could equally well be argued that they helped fuel his eccentric and original artistic crusade.

Born in Melbourne in 1882, he had an upbringing which marked him – literally – for life. His sweet-natured and cultivated father was given to drunken philandering. This led to the syphilis which he passed on to his wife Rose, who vainly tried to keep him in order with a horsewhip. As a result the bond between the mother and her only child became pathologically close – ‘us two against the World’, as Grainger put it. This was the big love affair of his life, and it lasted until he was thirty-nine, when a deranged Rose jumped out of a window of the Aeolian building in New York.