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The Ninth Symphony was begun early in 1956, and was finished, so far as a composition is ever finished, in November 1957. It was written chiefly in London, but partly in Majorca and partly at Ashmansworth, the home of Gerald and Joyce Finzi. The symphony is dedicated to the Royal Philharmonic Society and was first played at a concert on the 2 April 1958 by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent. The usual symphony orchestra is used, with the addition of three saxophones and flügel horn. This beautiful and neglected instrument is not usually allowed in the select circles of the orchestra and has been banished to the brass band, where it is allowed to indulge in the bad habit of vibrato to its heart's content. There are four movements, as is usual in a symphony: Allegro Moderato, Andante Sostenuto, Allegro Pesante, and Andante Tranquillo.

This chapter examines how Anna del Monte lived closed within ghetto walls; and like all other Jews in that city, she was constantly pressed to renounce Judaism and accept Christianity. Conversionary activities in Anna's day were intense and sometimes violent. She left a record of her experiences, which her brother Tranquillo del Monte heavily edited and began to circulate in a handwritten copy in 1793, years after Anna's death. This record, properly titled Anna's Ratto—her kidnapping, but often called her diary—furnishes unique testimony to Roman Jewry's late eighteenth-century plight. Through his correspondence with other Jewish communities, Tranquillo had learned of the enormous gap separating the increasingly desperate straits of Roman Jewry from the vast improvements in rights and civic standing recently won by the Jews of Western Europe and the new United States.

This chapter looks at how the growing threat to Jewish security heightened Tranquillo's resolve to make Anna's story known, even if this required embellishing on the details. This includes the scene of the final glory, when Anna is returned to her family on a Friday eve, for a joyous Sabbath celebration. Apart from the perplexing dating, Tranquillo's portrait of joy is problematic. The real Anna almost surely did not convert, or her name would appear in the House of Converts' records. Yet the diary's “happy ending” stretches the imagination, with Anna sent back to her family to continue life as a Jew unhindered. The reader does well to think of two young women named Anna: the real one, who was likely destroyed by the pressure, even without converting, and the idealized one, who held her own and kept her head high.

This chapter considers how Tranquillo del Monte was aware that the Jewish reality of his contemporary Rome had no resemblance to that in places like France and the United States; nor that policies in the Papal State, especially conversionary ones, were sui generis. The discipline intended to break Roman Jews that had begun with Paul IV and peaked under Pius VI was having its effects. A variety of means was being used to bring the Roman Jewry to capitulate, such as the intentional weakening of their communal apparatus. From no later than the mid-seventeenth century, powers of internal self-discipline and governance were attacked. Lacking authorization for a formal rabbinic court, the Jews of Rome had cultivated self-governance by emphasizing and expanding the traditional practice of consensual arbitration and by adopting standardized forms of documentation created by Jewish notaries.

This chapter describes how the Jews of Rome were perfectly aware of the forces that governed their existence. Accordingly, when legal, spiritual, cultural, and social distinctions of persons were removed under Napoleonic rule, the Jews hastened to respond optimistically. However, the Jews did not need to await Napoleonic liberation to appreciate how contradictory and absurd had been their condition. Scholars such as Giovanni Battista de Luca, Carlo Luti, and Giuseppe Sessa openly questioned, or were at least uneasy about, the paradox of Jews being simultaneously cives yet still denied full civic rights. The persona of Anna del Monte as Tranquillo fashioned it is that of “a figure on the seam.” Anna's story encapsulates the winds of the past, but it was no less a prologue to a sometimes precarious future.