Paperback
A critic’s intimate journey through post-war Britain’s musical golden age.
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Da Capo: A Life in Music

$62.20

  • Paperback

    128 pages

  • Release Date

    8 December 2026

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Summary

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 c…

Book Details

ISBN-13:9781837655830
ISBN-10:1837655839
Author:Diana McVeagh, J.P.E. Harper-Scott
Publisher:Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Imprint:The Boydell Press
Format:Paperback
Number of Pages:128
Release Date:8 December 2026
Dimensions:138mm x 216mm
A-Format
B-Format
Da Capo: A Life in Music by Diana McVeagh - ISBN: 9781837655830
138 × 216 mm
C-Format
A4
mm / in
About The Author

Diana McVeagh

Diana McVeagh

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

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.

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