Nicolas Flagello was one of the last American composers to pursue traditional romantic musical values, intensified by modernist innovations in harmony and rhythm, but without the irony or detachment of postmodernism. For him music was a personal medium for spiritual and emotional expression, a view that was far from fashionable during the years after 1945, when Flagello’s creative personality was crystallizing, a time when ‘originality’ and ‘experimental’ techniques reigned supreme. In such a milieu Flagello’s music gained little attention. Yet he held fast to his ideals throughout his life, producing a large and varied body of work that included six operas, two symphonies, eight concertos, and numerous orchestral, choral, chamber, and vocal works, although much of it was still unperformed at the time of his death, only in recent decades to find an increasingly sympathetic audience.