Gerald Finzi

Gerald Raphael Finzi (July 14, 1901 – September 27, 1956) was a British composer, whose popularity has increased considerably in the years since his death.

Works

Finzi’s output includes nine song-cycles, six of them to poems by Thomas Hardy. The first of these, By Footpath and Stile (1922), is for voice and string quartet, the others, including A Young Man’s Exhortation and Earth and Air and Rain, for voice and piano. Among his other songs, the charming Shakespeare settings in the cycle Let Us Garlands Bring (1942) are the best known. He also wrote incidental music to Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (1946). For voice and orchestra he composed the above-mentioned Dies natalis, a work of profound mysticity, and the pacifist Farewell to Arms (1944).

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Finzi’s choral music includes the popular anthems Lo, the full, final sacrifice and God is gone up as well as unaccompanied partsongs, but he also wrote larger-scale choral works such as For St. Cecilia (text by Edmund Blunden), Intimations of Immortality (William Wordsworth) and the Christmas scene In terra pax (Robert Bridges and the Gospel of Luke), all from the last ten years of his life.

Related Topics:
Edmund Blunden - William Wordsworth - Robert Bridges - Gospel of Luke

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The number of Finzi’s purely instrumental works is small even though he took great pains over them in the early part of his career. He began a piano concerto which was never finished, but material from its individual movements found its way into the gentle Eclogue and the vigorous Grand Fantasia and Toccata which demonstrates Finzi’s admiration for Johann Sebastian Bach. He also completed a violin concerto which was performed in London under the baton of Vaughan Williams, but was not satisfied with it and withdrew the two outer movements; the surviving middle movement is called Introit. This concerto thus received only its second performance in 1999 and its first recording is now on Chandos.

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Of Finzi's few chamber works, only the Five Bagatelles for clarinet and piano have survived in the regular repertoire.

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