Gerald Raphael Finzi was a British composer. Finzi is best
known as a choral composer, but also wrote in other genres. Large-scale
compositions by Finzi include the cantata Dies natalis for solo voice and
string orchestra, and his concertos for cello and clarinet.
Gerald Finzi was born in London, the son of John Abraham “Jack”
Finzi and Eliza Emma “Lizzie” Leverson. Finzi became one of the most
characteristically "English" composers of his generation. Despite
being an agnostic of Jewish descent, several of his choral works incorporate
Christian texts.
Finzi's father, a successful shipbroker, died just a
fortnight short of his son's eighth birthday. Finzi was educated privately.
During World War I the family settled in Harrogate, and Finzi began to study
music at Christ Church, High Harrogate, under Ernest Farrar from 1915. Farrar,
a former pupil of Stanford, was then aged thirty and he described Finzi as
"very shy, but full of poetry.” Finzi found him a sympathetic teacher, and
Farrar's death at the Western Front affected him deeply. During these formative
years he also suffered the loss of all three of his brothers.
These adversities contributed to Finzi's bleak outlook on
life, but he found solace in the poetry of Thomas Traherne and his favourite,
Thomas Hardy, whose poems, as well as those by Christina Rossetti, he began to
set to music. In the poetry of Hardy, Traherne, and later William Wordsworth,
Finzi was attracted by the recurrent motif of the innocence of childhood
corrupted by adult experience. From the very beginning, most of his music was
elegiac in tone.
After Farrar's death, Finzi studied privately at York
Minster with the organist and choirmaster Edward Bairstow, a strict teacher
compared to Farrar. In 1922, following five years of study with Bairstow, Finzi
moved to Painswick in Gloucestershire, where he began composing in earnest. His
first Hardy settings and the orchestral piece A Severn Rhapsody were soon
performed in London to favourable reviews.
In 1925, at the suggestion of Adrian Boult, Finzi took a
course in counterpoint with R. O. Morris and then moved to London, where he
became friendly with Howard Ferguson and Edmund Rubbra. He was also introduced
to Gustav Holst, Arthur Bliss and Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Vaughan Williams
obtained for him a teaching post (1930–1933) at the Royal Academy of Music.
Finzi never felt at home in the city and, having married the
artist Joyce Black, settled with her in Aldbourne, Wiltshire, where he devoted
himself to composing and apple-growing, saving a number of rare English apple
varieties from extinction. He also amassed a large library of some 3000 volumes
of English poetry, philosophy and literature, now kept at the University of
Reading and a collection (some 700 volumes including books, manuscripts and
printed scores) of 18th-century English music, now kept at the University of St
Andrews.
During the 1930s, Finzi composed only a few works, but it
was in these, notably the cantata Dies natalis (1939) to texts by Thomas
Traherne, that his fully mature style developed. He also worked on behalf of
the poet-composer Ivor Gurney, who had been committed to an institution. Finzi
and his wife catalogued and edited Gurney's works for publication. They also
studied and published English folk music and music by older English composers
such as William Boyce, Capel Bond, John Garth, Richard Mudge, John Stanley and
Charles Wesley.
In 1939 the Finzis moved to Ashmansworth in Hampshire, where
he founded the Newbury String Players, an amateur chamber orchestra which he
conducted until his death, reviving eighteenth century string music as well as
giving premieres of works by his contemporaries, and offering chances of
performance for talented young musicians such as Julian Bream and Kenneth
Leighton.
The outbreak of World War II delayed the first performance
of Dies natalis at the Three Choirs Festival, an event that could have
established Finzi as a major composer. He worked for the Ministry of War
Transport and lodged German and Czech refugees in his home. After the war, he
became somewhat more productive than before, writing several choral works as
well as the Clarinet Concerto (1949), perhaps his most popular work.
By now, Finzi's works were being performed frequently at the
Three Choirs Festival and elsewhere. But this happiness was not to last. In
1951, Finzi learned that he was suffering from the then incurable Hodgkin's
disease and had at most ten years to live. Something of his feelings after this
revelation is probably reflected in the agonized first movement of his Cello
Concerto (1955), Finzi's last major work, although its second movement,
originally intended as a musical portrait of his wife, is more serene.
In 1956, following an excursion near Gloucester with Vaughan
Williams, Finzi developed shingles, probably as a result of immune suppression
caused by Hodgkin's disease. He died soon afterwards, aged 55, in the Radcliffe
Infirmary hospital in Oxford, the first performance of his Cello Concerto on
the radio having been given the night before.
