Norman Lebrecht was asked recently to appear on the Metropolitan Opera broadcast as a commentator. Then he was disinvited. “The Met’s curse is unlikely to blight my life, as it did the careers of many artists. My only surprise was that it hadn’t happened before. In a quarter of a century of reporting musical affairs and commenting on them polemically, I have never been censored. I have been threatened with legal writs and, once, with a fist in my face, but no arts organisation until now has ever felt it necessary to shut me up.”