Da Capo: A Life in Music

Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-1-83765-584-7
Verlag: Boydell & Brewer

Buch, Englisch, 128 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 138 mm x 216 mm

An intimate memoir of Britain's post-war musical world by one of its most perceptive critics, capturing the people, personalities and institutions that shaped an era.

This book is a posthumous collection of vivid vignettes and recollections by the distinguished musicologist and critic Diana McVeagh (1926-2025). The narrative spans McVeagh's colonial childhood in Malaya, her musical education at the Royal College of Music in the final years of the Second World War, and her pioneering career as a female critic for The Times and assistant editor of The Musical Times. At its heart are intimate, unvarnished portraits of the figures she knew and worked with, including Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gerald Finzi, her first cousin Doris Lessing, and Alexander Fleming. It offers a unique, personal perspective on the 'Golden Age' of British music criticism and scholarship, written with McVeagh's characteristic warmth, intelligence, and wit. McVeagh was particularly noted for her authoritative studies of Elgar and Finzi. This memoir provides the personal context behind that scholarship, offering primary source material on the mid-twentieth-century British musical establishment.

The book is significant not only for its musical insights but as a social history of a woman carving out a career in the male-dominated worlds of journalism and music criticism in the 1950s and 1960s. With the recent passing of many figures from this era, McVeagh's detailed recollections of the personalities behind the music - from the eccentricity of Winton Dean to the domestic lives of the Finzis - preserve a world that has otherwise vanished. Prepared for publication by J. P. E. Harper-Scott after her death, the memoir retains, in line with the author's own philosophy that 'memories work by association, not time-tables', an associative structure organised into coherent thematic sections.

Autoren/Hrsg.

McVeagh, Diana

Harper-Scott, J. P. E.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Editorial foreword
Chronology
Friends Pictured Within: Personalia

Chapter One: Rooting in salt water
Sea drift to Fairways

Chapter Two: A curious ear

Chapter Three: A thunderer in green eye shades
Printing House Square
The river man
The token woman
Wagner course.
Critical friends

Chapter Four: The dreamy child
Hearing with eyes
Other Elgarian friends
The importance of Elgar

Chapter Five: Fact-gathering in the orchard
Editing the letters
Kiffer
Parasites and interpreters

Chapter Six: You are family
Alexander Fleming
Vaughan Williams and Ursula
The Lessing connection
Bill
Time of dying

Chapter Seven: Travels and later life
Hurtigruten voyages
French wine ships/cargo voyages
The voluntary retreat
Travelling alone
Yoga and reflection
Returning archives

Editorial afterword
A Parting Glance (by Piers Lane)

Über Autor(innen)

Harper-Scott, J. P. E.
J. P. E. Harper-Scott is Professor of Music History and Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London, and General Editor of the Cambridge University Press series, 'Music in Context'. His work focuses on an examination of music's cultural, personal, and interpersonal significance since around 1800. It draws extensively on philosophical, cultural, and social theory and the explanatory resources of music theory, and espouses an explicitly Leftist perspective. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Ideology in Britten's Operas (2018), The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism (2012), and Edward Elgar, Modernist (2006). He has edited essay collections with Julian Rushton (Elgar Studies, 2007) and Jim Samson (An Introduction to Music Studies, 2009), and a volume of Wagner Studies, edited with Steven Vande Moortele, is under contract to Cambridge University Press.

McVeagh, Diana
DIANA MCVEAGH is a Vice-President of the Elgar Society. Her interests range from Josquin to Birtwistle, but she writes mostly about English Romantics. She is the author of Elgar: His Life and Music (Dent, 1955), and the highly acclaimed Gerald Finzi: His Life and Music (Boydell, 2005 and 2010), and Elgar: The Music Maker (Boydell, 2007). She has contributed to the New Grove (1980, 2001) and the Dictionary of National Biography.