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.