Diana McVeagh obituary

The Guardian

27-07-2025

The writer Diana McVeagh, who has died aged 98, carved a niche for herself as a particular authority on the composers Edward Elgar and Gerald Finzi. Indeed she may aptly be described as the doyenne of Elgar studies, which previously had been a largely male preserve.
While still in her 20s she was invited by the scholar Eric Blom, as an adviser to the publishers Dent, to write a book about Elgar. The result, published as Edward Elgar: His Life and Music (1955), preceded three other major postwar biographies (by Jerrold Northrop Moore, Michael Kennedy and Robert Anderson), though Diana outlived those writers. Replete with insight and characterised by the bold, sometimes controversial, judgments that she became known for in later years, it was a remarkable achievement.
Revisiting the subject in Elgar the Music Maker (2007) half a century later, she did not hesitate to revise some of those judgments in the light of experience. In the 1950s, for example, she had not been able to hear the pre-Gerontius cantatas, of which she was quite dismissive, in performance. In the later book, with the benefit of subsequent commercial recordings, she made amends by discussing those works, not least Caractacus and The Light of Life, at some length and with greater admiration.
It was the high opinion of the 1955 Elgar book held by Finzi that persuaded the latter's family, on his death the following year, to approach Diana to undertake his life and works. 'We were charmed by her bright personality,' wrote Finzi's widow, Joy, 'a great character for one so apparently demure and young.'
It was a work long in gestation, not least because the trove of unpublished correspondence and other previously unseen material released by the family needed to be absorbed (though a good deal of this had already been incorporated in Stephen Banfield's fine appraisal of 1997). Diana's biography finally appeared in 2005, and her monumental edition of the letters, 1,052 pages in length, scrupulously annotated, followed in 2021.
Diana was born in Ipoh, the capital of the state of Perak in the then British colony of Malaya, where her father, John McVeagh, was the manager of a rubber plantation. Her mother, Margaret, had studied singing with Harry Plunket Greene at the Royal College of Music, London.
The family returned to her mother's homeland in the Welsh valleys when Diana was five years old, but at the age of 10 she was sent to Malvern girls' college, where she remained for eight years before going to the Royal College of Music in 1944. Her intention had been to study the piano with Kathleen Long, but arriving with one hand broken in a recent riding accident, she took instead weekly lessons with Frank Howes, music critic of the Times. This in turn led to her filing a review of Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius for the paper in 1948, the first of many she contributed over the following two decades. From 1964 to 1967 she acted as assistant editor to Andrew Porter on the Musical Times.
She subsequently joined the editorial board of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, with particular responsibility for performers, and contributing the articles on Elgar and Finzi. In addition to Musical Times, she contributed many articles to such periodicals as The Listener and Records and Recordings.
Despite her somewhat feline protective aura, Diana was a warm-hearted, encouraging colleague, not least to those of us fortunate to work with her at New Grove. For three years she suffered from the debilitating disease myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME or chronic fatigue syndrome) before relinquishing her editorial responsibilities to spend more time with her husband, Bill (CW) Morley, a pathologist, in his advancing years.
Among the bold judgments of Elgar in her youthful study is the observation that he 'was never to surpass the poetic delicacy of Stanford or the unselfconscious nobility of Parry at their best, and they could never have written anything as meretricious as Elgar at his worst'. Her chapter on Elgar's character is a minor masterpiece of insight into the polarities by which his nature was marked: caustic, tactless, boisterous on the one hand, generous, warm-hearted and sensitive on the other. Attributing that sensitivity in part to Elgar's inferiority complex, which made him 'alive to the problems of others', she is frank too about his lapses into small-mindedness and bigotry – the result, perhaps, of his lack of a formal education.
She also wrote sentiently about the traumatic impact of the death in 1920 of Elgar's wife on his creative impulses and zest for life. Surprisingly dismissive about late works such as the Piano Quintet and Violin Sonata, she made amends in Elgar the Music Maker by acknowledging the ghostly, evocative passages of the former, and the poetic and reflective material of the latter, which raise these works to a superior level.
The Finzi biography, like both the Elgar books, was distinguished by the wit and elegance of its prose style, as well as the author's ear for nuance in the music. As she aptly pointed out, to experience Finzi's celebrated choral work Intimations of Immortality as merely euphonious and benign is to miss the desolation at its heart.
She married Morley in 1950; he died in 1994.
Diana Mary McVeagh, writer, born 6 September 1926; died 2 July 2025