Brown was just seven years old when she first had an encounter with a dead composer. The year was 1923, and she was in her parents’ bedroom at her home in Balham, south-west London, when a man with a flowing cassock appeared before her and explained that he’d one day make her famous. Ten years later, she saw a drawing of the composer Franz Liszt (1811–1886) and immediately recognised him as that strange visitor from all those years ago. It wasn’t until three decades on from that moment, though, that Liszt would finally return to Brown ‘in person’ and begin to fulfil his promise of making her
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