Cautious figure beginning to triumph with retro musical (9)

I believe the answer is:

tentative

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'cautious' is the definition.
(thesaurus)

'beginning to triumph with retro musical' is the wordplay.
'beginning to' indicates taking the first letters.
'with' becomes 'ent' (I am not sure about this - if you are sure you should give a lot more credence to this answer).
'retro' says the letters should be written backwards (retro is Latin for 'backwards').
'musical' becomes 'evita' (I've seen this before).
The first letter of 'triumph' is 't'.
'evita' written backwards gives 'ative'.
't'+'ent'+'ative'='TENTATIVE'

'figure' is the link.
I am not very happy about this link. It may be part of another bit of the clue.

Can you help me to learn more?

(Other definitions for tentative that I've seen before include "Conjectural" , "Hesitant; provisional" , "Diffident" , "To be confirmed" , "Exploratory, unconfident" .)

I've seen this clue in The Independent.

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