Finnissy, Erika Fox, Malcolm Lipkin, Carlo Martelli and John White. Stevens was intellectually and emotionally committed to the left and associated with other socialist artists and writers, such as his friends Alan Bush, Mary and Geraldine Peppin, Randall Swingler and Montagu Slater, and was active in the Workers' Music Association. In 1955 a contentious slander case served by Edward Clark on Benjamin Frankel (involving an accusation that Frankel had embezzled ISCM funds) involved Bernard Stevens and Christian Darnton as witnesses. They were accused by Frankel of lying at the behest of the Communist Party. This had a devastating effect on Stevens. He resigned his Party membership a year later, also as a protest against the Soviet suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. He nevertheless remained committed to Marxist principles. Stevens lived at 71 Parkhill Road, Belsize Park after the war, a house he bought from Max Rostal. Seeking a more peaceful environment where he could compose, he moved in 1951 to a village in Essex, where his address was The Forge, Great Maplestead. His music room was in a converted blacksmith's forge next to the house. In the late 1960s he and Bertha acquired a small plot of land near Mahón on the island of Menorca and built a holiday villa there, where they spent many summers over the following decade. His final work, the Concertante for Two Pianos (written for Isobel Beyer and Harvey Dagul), was composed at the villa. Stevens died in January 1983 after being diagnosed with cancer six years earlier. He was survived by his wife Bertha and daughter Catherine Stevens (born 1952), a viola player. Music Influenced by composers such as Ernest Bloch, Ferruccio Busoni, Shostakovich, Alan Bush and Edmund Rubbra, Stevens also used fantasia-like elements of form which he took from the Elizabethans Dowland and Farnaby. He frequently composed tightly compressed works - such as the Opus 1 Violin Sonata and the later Piano Sonata - incorporating three individual movements within a single, uninterrupted span. The Symphony No.1 (1945), a cry of "Liberation" after Nazism, could seem gestural with its looser structure and programmatic elements, and is not typical. Even so, it "completely avoids the rhetoric and pomp of many other 'Victory' pieces". His Fugal Overture received its premiere at the BBC Proms in 1948, conducted by Malcolm Sargent. The more inward looking pieces that followed use an essentially diatonic but increasingly individual harmonic