Elgar the Music Maker
- Author: McVeagh, Diana
McVeagh is also able to make it clear how much she loves and admires the music without making any extravagant claims on its behalf. It's hard to imagine a more sane approach...the insights...keep...
Elgar the Music Maker
- Author: McVeagh, Diana
Purchase product
McVeagh is also able to make it clear how much she loves and admires the music without making any extravagant claims on its behalf. It's hard to imagine a more sane approach...the insights...keep...
About
The new Diana McVeagh book on Elgar is first-rate, wrote Gerald Finzi of her earlier study of the composer, published in 1955. In the completely new Elgar the Music Maker she harvests five decades of thoughts about his music, scrutinizing the biographical details that have since been discovered and using them to assess the ways in which they affect the compositions. Diana McVeagh explores Elgar's complex personality and his compositional methods, his style and his relationship to his contemporaries, yet it is the music - still played, recorded, loved and discussed as much as ever- that remains her prime focus. Each of Elgar's works is discussed, balancing information and appraisal, from his juvenilia to his unfinished Third Symphony. Diana McVeagh provides a compelling and accessible companion to the music of one of England's greatest composers. Musicians, scholars and CD collectors alikewill find much to enjoy in Elgar the Music Maker. Diana McVeagh is the author of the highly acclaimed Gerald Finzi: His Life and Music [2005]; of the entries on Elgar and Finzi for The New Grove Dictionaryof Music and Musicians [1980, 2001]; and of the Finzi entry in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [2004].
Contents
- The Making of an Enigma 1857-1899
- To the Greater Glory of God 1899-1909
- The Symphonist
- The Music of Wartime 1914-1920
- The Last Years 1920-1934
- Coda
Awards and reviews
McVeagh is also able to make it clear how much she loves and admires the music without making any extravagant claims on its behalf. It's hard to imagine a more sane approach...the insights...keep coming. -- Stephen Johnson
Effortlessly readable, fresh prose. Almost every page has some gem of illumination...An essential listener's companion. -- Julian Haylock
The analysis...is observation, discovery of what this music is. You're led to it by feeling, and back to feeling it returns. That is the essential way of good music criticism, and this book is full of it. -- John Steane
McVeagh's book, the concentrated essence of a lifetime's care for his music, has much to tell us about even the most familiar scores. -- John Warrack
In associating events of the times with almost all of Elgar's works, McVeagh wears her encyclopedic knowledge lightly: her prose is clean, charming, and clever, and her forays into theory/musicology are brief and to the point...A congenial companion for those who know little about Elgar; a worthy quick read for the knowledgeable. Highly recommended
Music and Letters
Deserves to be read widely, and we should be grateful to Diana McVeagh for producing an immensely readable and always wise handbook to Elgar's oeuvre
