His lifelong love was English poetry. Apart from concerts on the clarinet and cello, his most famous works are vocal or choral pieces or solo songs, and his greatest inspiration came from his deep love and understanding of poetry. He edited and arranged most of the music performed by almost forgotten 18th century English composers such as Richard Mudge, William Boyce and John Stanley. Finzi’s own music was written slowly and often took many years for the work to reach its final form.
“The artist is like the coral insect, building his reef out of the transitory world around him and making a solid structure to last long after his fragile and uncertain life…”
Gerald Finzi
His songs’ seeming simplicity resulted from both skill and intent. Through understanding Finzi’s compositional style, personal motivations, and connection with the poetry and poet, a more complete understanding of Finzi and his music will be achieved. For example, why he chose those particular texts, his state of mind while composing them, and how knowledge of certain stylistic tendencies used often throughout Before and after Summer might reveal clues about how a singer and pianist might craft a more authentic presentation.
Gerald Finzi was born in London on July 14, 1901, and spent his early childhood in London. His father died when he was just seven and following the outbreak of the First World War Finzi moved with his mother to Harrogate, in Yorkshire.
Educated privately, Finzi became hipped on literature and music. His mother took him to Charles V. Stanford, who told her essentially not to waste her time and who rejected Finzi as a pupil. Nevertheless, Finzi studied with Ernest Farrar and Edward Bairstow and, later, counterpoint with R. O. Morris. Farrar’s death in the First World War devastated Finzi. He was too young and too asthmatic to have fought, but the War affected him almost as much as it did the combatants.
His first published work was ‘By Footpath and Stile’ (1921-22), a song-cycle for baritones and string quartet to texts by Thomas Hardy, whose work Finzi greatly admired.
After the War, Finzi fell in with a group of younger composers – including Herbert Howells, Arthur Bliss, Howard Ferguson, and Edmund Rubbra. He also became friendly with Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Ferguson often became the de facto musical technical reference and editor for Finzi’s orchestral and ensemble works. Still, Finzi had enough technique to become a teacher at the Royal Academy of Music from 1930 to 1933.
In 1931, Finzi married Joyce Black (known as “Joy”), a very good portrait artist. In 1935, they moved to the Wiltshire countryside. There, in addition to writing music, Finzi cultivated rare varieties of apple trees commercial horticulture had driven out and assembled a huge library of books and musical scores.
He became one of the pioneers and leading authorities on English music of the eighteenth century and produced many performing editions. He also began to catalogue the music of English songwriter and poet Ivor Gurney and of Vaughan Williams’ teacher Charles Hubert Parry. However, many of his mature compositions also come from this period: the Thomas Hardy song cycles A Young Man’s Exhortation, as well as Earth and Air and Rain, the choral cycle 7 Partsongs to words by Robert Bridges, and the Traherne cantata Dies Natalis. The last represented a career breakthrough, both to audience awareness and acceptance and to a new-found ease (relatively speaking) in composition. Finzi remarked that, for the first time, he felt like a real composer.
Finzi’s music is firmly rooted in the relatively-conservative pastoral English tradition of Hubert Parry, Edward Elgar, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. During his lifetime, his works were largely overshadowed by the more-progressive works of his contemporaries, such as Benjamin Britten, who appealed to a larger, international audience. It was only after his death that Finzi began to be recognized as a significant composer with the eventual publication, recording, and dissemination of his collected works.
When World War II began, Finzi tried to enlist in combat, but his early bouts of illness caused the military to reject him. Nevertheless, he pulled strings and got a job in the Ministry of War Transport. He also founded and led the Newbury String Players, a mixed group of amateurs and professionals. He became a decent conductor, and this activity accelerated his preparation of scholarly editions and performing editions of English eighteenth-century music – at the least, something for the group to play. These were his wartime activities, and they left him with little time for composing, although even here he managed to produce his Shakesperean cycle Let Us Garlands Bring, written as a birthday tribute to Vaughan Williams.
Regardless of his conservative style, Finzi’s music stands apart from other pastoral composers because of the serious nature of the poetry he chooses to set – its introspection, and its, at times, fatalistic perspective – particularly evident in his songs that set the poetry of Thomas Hardy. Stylistically, Finzi’s songs generally contain melodies that are lyrical and almost exclusively syllabic, though he had a penchant for employing large leaps for effect. He generally avoids thick accompanimental textures, preferring instead continuo-like bass lines with simple, occasionally contrapuntal realizations above.
After the War, Finzi the composer started producing in earnest. He was now in his forties. The major work of this period is a large-scale oratorio, a nearly-complete setting of Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. Also from this period comes the large choral ode For St. Cecilia.
Finzi was not an accomplished pianist, but his experience conducting and arranging for small orchestral ensembles is evident in the accompaniment of his later songs, which suit the text and help Finzi create the appropriate atmosphere. Generally, accompanimental rhythms are simple and motivic. At times Finzi uses gently shifting rhythmic patterns that resemble those of Brahms or Schumann (e.g., repeating patterns of eighth-note, quarter-note, eighth-note combinations).
Finzi wrote several larger works of varying size and scope. The most familiar are for choir (often including soloist(s) and orchestra), including Dies Natalis, Intimations of Immortality, In terra pax, and Lo, the full, final sacrifice. His well-known concerti for clarinet and cello are regularly programmed as well. Finzi’s songs, however, show him at his best; they remain the most significant part of his oeuvre and his lasting legacy to English music.
In 1951, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease and given less than ten years to live. He and his wife kept the news pretty much to themselves, and he managed to engage in a full life (including chairing a major Bartók symposium) almost up to a week before the end. From this final period come such works as the clarinet and cello concertos, the suite made from incidental music to a Forties radio production of Love’s Labors Lost, the Grand Fantasia and Toccata for piano and orchestra, and his final score, the beautiful Christmas cantata In terra pax.
The Finzis’ elder son Christopher (Kiffer) became a noted conductor and interpreter of his father’s music, conducting first the Newbury String Players after his father’s death and then, from 1971 to 1997, the North Wiltshire Orchestra which was then based in Marlborough. In 1961, he married Hilary du Pré, the sister of the cellist Jacqueline du Pré, who together were the principal protagonists of the 1998 film Hilary and Jackie, in which Christopher was played by David Morrissey. Nigel Finzi (d. 2010) was an accomplished violinist. and in the years following his father’s death, worked closely with his mother Joy in promoting his father’s music.
But no work from a first rate mind is ever really second rate.
Gerald Finzi
