Da Capo: A Life in Music

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.

Table of Contents:
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)

About the Author :
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. 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.