other notes - Finzi

Gerald Finzi, born in London in 1901, was the son of ashipbroker whose Jewish forbears had emigrated from Italy in the 18th century. After a brief spell in the Gloucestershire countryside, he returned to London where he taught composition at the Royal Academy of Music, and joined a circle of composers that included Gustav Holst, Benjamin Britten, Peter Warlock and Ralph Vaughan Williams. In 1937 he and his wife built a house in the Hampshire Hills where he composed, conducted, studied and grew apples until his death in 1956.

Finzi’s childhood was predominantly unhappy; as the youngest of five children and the only one manifesting artistic skills and interests, he felt himself to be the outsider in an uncomprehending family. His loneliness caused him to find companionship in books, leading to an encyclopedic knowledge of English poetry and literature. These were years haunted by death too; by the age of seventeen, his father and all his brothers were dead, as was his revered composition teacher Ernest Farrar. Finzi’s experience during these years left him with the conviction that, for many, the reality of adult life and experience dims the instinctive, intuitive freshness of childhood.

Thomas Traherne was a little-known 17^th century metaphysical poet whose work was forgotten for two centuries. Traherne’s significance lies in his continuing the line of Anglican mystical poetry after Vaughan, yet little is known about the poet himself. He was born circa 1636, gained his BA at Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1656 and returned to his native county as rector of Credenhill, a few miles from Hereford. There he became spiritual adviser to Susanna Hopton for whom he wrote his most important prose work, the Centuries of Meditation. From 1669 to 1674 he lived in London where he died at age thirty-seven.

Finzi began his setting of Traherne’s vision of a child’s innocent and unsullied perception of the world in the mid 1920s. The finished work, which he called Dies Natalis (literally, ‘Day of birth’), resembled a Baroque cantata in form. The choice of a purely instrumental movement, ‘Intrada’, to begin Dies Natalis creates an image of the unborn child in the womb, and is synonymous too with Traherne’s lines, ‘An empty book is like an infant’s soul, in which anything may be written, it is capable of all things but containeth nothing’. 

The second movement ‘Rhapsody’ should be understood in its 17^th century meaning of ‘rapturous delight or ecstasy’, its text describing the infant’s wide-eyed response to the world it has entered. Finzi’s setting is composed in the fluid, supple recitative-cum-arioso style of which he was a master and responds to each nuance of the text.

Finzi had two images in mind when composing ‘The Rapture’: the dancing circle of angels above the oxen-stall of Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity that hangs in The National Gallery, and the magnificent carved wooden angels in March Church in the Fens which he had visited on holiday in 1927. With these in mind Finzi fashioned this swirling dance of praise, as here called in 1939: “There is a great resemblance between the static and the ecstatic. I discovered this one day when I was standing in March Church looking up at the double hammer-beam roof and the row of carved angels—which gave the feeling of a Botticelli Nativity and were static from very ecstasy.”

‘Wonder’ is set as a tender arioso. Traherne’s opening line, ‘How like an Angel came I down!’, is evoked through a vocal phrase that seems to float in its descent. The climactic phrase ‘With Seas of Life, like Wine’ is mirrored by Finzi in rich nine-part string writing.

A quality of concord and timelessness characterizes ‘The Salutation’, in which the soloist’s aria is cast in the form of a Bach chorale prelude. Its arching, soaring melody is quintessential Finzi, and is accompanied by flowing counterpoint over the steady measured tramp of the bass.The violas set the movement in motion and their contrapuntal idea is then shared amongst the other instruments; the verses are interspersed with limpid orchestral flowerings marked by falling sevenths until finally the violas wind the movement to stillness in a mood of rapt wonder.