GERALD FINZI

Gerald Finzi had an Italian surname, but his family had lived in England for a century and a half, and he was a quintessentially English composer. He was born in 1901 and died in 1956. On the last day of his life, dying of leukemia in hospital, he heard on the BBC the broadcast premiere of his clarinet concerto. Like all of his music, it is by turns lively and gentle, everywhere fresh-sounding, and wholly accessible. His instrumental works were beautifully true to the nature and potentialities of the instruments, especially the string works. But his enduring reputation will always rest primarily on his vocal works. These are of outstanding merit, and they have a character uniquely and recognizably his.
The essential qualities of his writing for the voice are all present in his five song-cycles to texts by Thomas Hardy, for baritone and piano, especially in “Earth and Air and Rain”; in “Let us garlands bring”, his Shakespearean songs, also for baritone and piano; and in “Dies Natalis”, his cantata for high voice and string orchestra, with text by Thomas Traherne. Clearly, he had excellent taste in literature — something that is not always true among composers: sadly often, even gifted composers choose texts banal in sentiment and trite in expression.
Choosing a good text is not, in itself, a guarantee of a good setting. The composer must not be merely a servant of the text, slavishly using music as just a vehicle for it. Nor, on the other hand, should he be so wrapped up in purely musical ideas that the words become just a vehicle for the notes. In all the best song-writers, a fine balance is struck between words and notes that creates a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Finzi was one such. And if his general approach had that balance as its aim, in particular details he was a consummate word-setter. This is a gift rooted in an ear minutely sensitive to language (in this case, the English language), to its rhythms and stresses and pitches, and to the individual quality of every syllable, both on its own and in relation to the phrase encompassing it. Especially does this gift come into play when a composer sets the neutral vowel, known to phoneticists as schwa; this is the vowel found in the second syllable of sugar, broken, vision, bullet, and column. Any composer who sets the two syllables of the word blessed to two notes of equal stress is inviting the singer to pronounce the second syllable to rhyme with bed. There are quite enough distortions of English spawned by the speak-as-you-spell movement (the semi-literate parlance that gives us Anthony with a th as in thong) without composers adding to their number. Finzi was never guilty of such a blunder. Indeed, so scrupulous is his setting of all vowels that it would be difficult for a singer to mispronounce his texts. Difficult, but not impossible: there are, unfortunately, recordings available, some of them made by well-known singers, that mangle the language unconscionably. But composers should no more be blamed for the sins of bad singers than Cranmer should be blamed for simpering parsons who elocute devotion as though it had four syllables.
Good singers, equally sensitive to words and notes, will benefit from Finzi’s care in such matters without having to analyze the details of his method. They will simply accept, with gratitude, the results of that method. And what will especially appeal to them, and to their listeners, is the extraordinary eloquence, and fittingness, of the melodies Finzi created to give the words a lyric life beyond the life they already possess on the printed page. A fine example of that artful craft is in the tune he came up with in setting “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun”, the epitaph-like poem from “Coriolanus” — another text, among many, showing Finzi’s canny taste in settable verse. The opening lines read:-
“Fear no more the heat o’ the sun
Nor the all-furious winter’s rages:
Thou thy earthly work hast done,
Home art gone and ta’en thy wages.
Golden lads and girls all must
As chimney-sweepers come to dust”.
It takes a daring composer, one might almost say a presumptuous one, to think he can match the eloquence of Shakespeare with an eloquence of his own. Yet Finzi accomplishes exactly that. His melody, at once consolatory and poignant, goes step by step with the words in a cohesion that seems virtually inevitable, giving them an even greater resonance and depth than they have on their own, while never being at odds with them. So true is this that anyone, once having heard the Finzi setting, can never again read the text without hearing that music along with it.
Similar tunes abound in all the Shakespeare and Hardy settings. But Finzi’s undoubted masterpiece is his setting of Traherne’s prose and verse in the cantata “Dies Natalis”. The title, which translates as “Day of Birth”, is apt: for the whole text is a celebration of the world into which the soul is born and which the newborn soul must greet with the same wonderment as Adam felt on first awakening in Eden. Indeed, not just this text, but the whole of Traherne’s oeuvre is shot through with that kind of mystical awareness of the numinous in all created things. It is a very large body of work, and Finzi did a shrewd job of selecting passages from it that would jointly reflect Traherne at his best and at the same time enable him, as a composer, to capture the essence of Traherne in a musical language of matching power and originality.
The cantata begins with a string introduction of great beauty, that proceeds without pause into the first vocal movement. This is a setting of lines from Traherne’s prose work, “Centuries of Meditation” (all the subsequent movements are settings of poems), and they announce the content and intent of the work right away. “Will you see the infancy,” the singer asks, “of this sublime and celestial greatness? I was a stranger, which at my entrance into the world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys. My knowledge was divine. I was entertained like an angel with the works of God in their splendour and glory. Heaven and earth did sing my Creator’s praises, and could not make more melody to Adam than to me. Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more strange and curious apprehensions of the world than I. All appeared new and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and beautiful. All things were spotless and pure, and glorious. The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The green trees, when I saw them first, transported and ravished me: their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy; they were such strange and beautiful things. Oh, what venerable creatures did the aged seem: immortal cherubims; and the young men, glittering and sparkling angels, and maids, strange seraphic creatures of life and beauty. I knew not that they were born or should die. I dreamed not of poverties, contentions, or vices. All tears and quarrels were hidden from mine eyes. I saw all in the peace of Eden. Every thing was at rest: free, and immortal”.
Inspired by those words, and by the poems that followed them, Finzi composed a work imbued musically with the same spirit of childlike wonder as pervades the text. He worked on it for thirteen years, from 1926 to 1939, and it represents something very dear to his heart: for he was, by temperament, a nature-lover and a countryman; as a professional, he necessarily spent time, on and off, in London; but by choice he lived in rural places, ending up in the heart of Hampshire, with his artist wife, in a house they built to create the ideal working environment. There, he composed and she painted. And when he was not busy with his music, he amassed a large and valuable collection of good books, and cultivated a large orchard of rare apple-trees.
It should not be thought that Finzi’s love of the natural world was sentimentally romantic. He did respond, touchingly, to Traherne’s shining vision of Eden. But for him, it was a lost Paradise, a standing rebuke to the world of sophistication and cynicism that he deplored, yet had to accept as a reality. He incorporated into his own life whatever he could of that prelapsarian innocence, by putting down roots in an unspoilt countryside. But he was earthy enough to see things as they really are: the weather, the landscape, the beasts of the field, the plant life — you cannot tend apple-trees and cement the grafting by hand with cattle-dung, without learning the basics of natural life. Nor did Finzi cut himself off from the larger world, in his retreat: he was by preference a pacifist, but reluctantly he acknowledged the necessity of World War Two — indeed, it would have been hard for him not to: the Finzis are Italian Jews, and no one in 1939 could be unaware of the deadly threat to European Jewry.
That war was an inescapable reality in everyone’s life at the time. It bore fruit, musically, in two works by Benjamin Britten: the “Holy Sonnets of John Donne”, which were indirectly prompted by Britten’s appalled visit to Buchenwald after VE-Day; and his “War Requiem”, composed in a spirit of reconciliation. “Dona Nobis Pacem”, by Ralph Vaughan Williams, can be seen as carrying the same message. All three of these works, incidentally, display a skill in word-setting that is on a par with Finzi’s mastery of that art. Nor was this a rare phenomenon in England during that general period. English musical culture, then, was peculiarly rich in composers who wrote for the voice with great sensitivity to text. Besides Finzi, Britten, and Vaughan Williams, one could list Arnold Bax, George Butterworth, Ivor Gurney, Gustav Hoist, Herbert Howells, John Ireland, Edmund Rubbra, William Walton, and Peter Warlock. There had not been a similar flowering of verbal adroitness allied to musical genius since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: that period was ushered in by William Byrd, the supreme word-setter of all time, and it drew to a close with Henry Purcell, his near-rival in that particular art.
Gerald Finzi, without question, belonged in their league.

