The Finzi Moment
NORDLINGER, JAY
The Finzi Moment A Composer Receives His Due By Jay Nordlinger How do we know when a composer's moment has come? The signs are various: His works pop up on concert programs. Recordings are made....
...Such music rarely survives its context, but Finzi's score is graceful and inventive, meriting comparison to Walton's much-admired accompaniment to Laurence Olivier's film version of Henry V. Finzi, then, is established...
...His output was comparatively small, and he devoted himself primarily to religious music for the voice—hardly a Jay Nordlinger, associate editor and music critic of The Weekly Standard, last wrote on the late Georg Solti...
...Finzi's concluding "Salutation" is surpassingly reverent, a quietly confident affirmation of the good there is, even in the here and now...
...Still, big reputations—at least since the Baroque era—are not made on church music...
...Britten, too, excelled in it, yet we know him chiefly for his orchestral pieces and his grand operas, Peter Grimes and Billy Budd...
...Americans, to a lesser degree, do the same, which is why we have trouble escaping Charles Ives...
...It is nicely balanced and meticulously crafted, affording the clarinet some brilliant moments while eschewing distracting virtuosity...
...A composer, he once said, is like a "coral-reef insect, building his reef out of the transitory world around him and making a solid structure to last long after his own fragile and uncertain life...
...There, he found a measure of peace...
...Finzi exemplified that artistic cliche, the tortured soul...
...He seemed incapable of gaining his footing...
...To enter the standard repertory, the piece will require forceful, consistent advoca-cy—and even then, its chances are slim, as sprawling quasi-oratorios for tenor, chorus, and orchestra are not traditionally crowd-pleasers...
...Finzi would return to these authors throughout his career...
...The clarinet concerto easily holds its own with the most distinguished such concertos of the 20th century, not excluding the Copland...
...It is the sort of piece for which the term "minor masterpiece" was coined—minor only because some other term must be reserved for the "Jupiter" Symphony and the Missa Solemnis...
...Relief came, just in time, in the form of a woman—the portraitist Joyce Black (later known as Joy Finzi...
...Finzi wrote no symphonies, no operas, precious little piano music...
...He collected his books, catalogued early British music, promoted the work of his contemporaries (some of whom he never even met), and tended his apple orchard...
...Second rate is, indeed, a startling achievement, and so are third and fourth...
...His Magnificat is beatific and stirring, at times almost operatic in its expressiveness...
...Finzi did not write prolifi-cally, but he wrote deeply, leaving an impression that may prove ineffaceable...
...One of his better-known works is a group of Shakespeare songs, Let Us Garlands Bring, dedicated to Vaughan Williams, a friend and mentor, on his 70th birthday...
...His Romance and Nocturne are orchestral miniatures, delicate beauties that meander with polyphonic murmurings and evocative melodies...
...They married—with Vaughan Williams as a witness—and moved to the Hampshire countryside, where Finzi built a house with his own hands...
...He was a self-described agnostic, but he would not, or could not, leave religion alone...
...The piece resembles, if anything, Mahler's Lied von der Erde (which uses German translations of mystical Chinese verses...
...Sometimes, a single champion wages an obvious campaign...
...The mezzo-soprano Janet Baker used to favor this cycle, and Bryn Terfel, the young baritone sensation from Wales, has included it in a recent recording...
...Finzi's liturgical music, infrequently heard outside the larger British cathedrals, is steadily finding its way onto disc...
...The Three Short Elegies are sturdy and agreeable, and Let us now praise famous men swells with Old Testament virility...
...The Adagio movement is particularly effective—haunting, elegiac, achingly beautiful...
...Intimations of Immortality, based on Wordsworth's Recollections of Early Childhood, is a more ambitious work but less successful...
...An Englishman who lived from 1901 to 1956, he has always dwelt in the shadows of his celebrated peers, such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten, and William Walton...
...A professor once told me a useful anecdote: A student has the temerity to ask, "But wasn't Mendelssohn second rate...
...which received an immortal setting from Schubert—is light and joyous...
...The British record labels, too—EMI, Hyperion, Chandos, Nimbus—evidently consider it their duty to preserve the national musical heritage, and they churn out disc after disc, seemingly heedless of the bottom line...
...The Seven Partsongs, to texts of Robert Bridges, are elegant and inspired—the King's Singers turned one of them, "My spirit sang all day," into something close to a hit...
...The Finzi Singers were founded in 1982, performing and recording not only Finzi's music, but that of his fellows...
...The story of Finzi's life is little known even in musical circles...
...And yet, if we are not in the midst of a Finzi boom, we are experiencing what may be called a Finzi awareness, a recognition that here was a composer of remarkable and lasting gifts...
...He was an awkward, sensitive, introspective child, alarmed by what the world held out...
...Finzi sought refuge in literature, about which (unusual for a musician) he was enormously knowledgeable...
...More often, as is now the case with Gerald Finzi, there is no discernible effort—just something in the air...
...By the time he was 18, with World War I just drawing to a close, his father, his three brothers, and his beloved teacher, the composer Ernest Farrar, were all dead...
...He was especially attached to the mystical poets of the 17th century—Henry Vaughan, Thomas Tra-herne, Edward Taylor—and to Wordsworth...
...Written shortly before Finzi's death, it is the work of an artist on the cusp of a higher phase, one who, given another decade or so, might have ascended to the next rank...
...Finzi is not exactly barreling toward fame, but neither is he choking in the dustbins...
...Unceasingly, he jousted with God...
...The professor, unruffled, thinks for a minute, then says, "Maybe so, but do you understand how good that is...
...When he was in his mid-20s—that is, rather late—he went to London to study counterpoint at the Royal College of Music...
...Before long, he began to instruct at another school, the Royal Academy of Music, and fell in with Howard Ferguson, Edmund Rubbra, and other young composers...
...Finzi's widow formed the Finzi Trust not long after his death, to act as custodian and evangelist...
...Work was cruelly painful for him—always a struggle, never a pleasure—and he despaired of fulfilling his considerable potential...
...These songs have the virtue of conveying feeling without sticky emotion—a hallmark of practically everything else that Finzi wrote, too...
...Edward Elgar had it, Gustav Holst had it, so did Vaughan Williams—it must be served to British schoolboys in their porridge...
...The tone is wide-eyed, innocent, ecstatic...
...The first song, "Come away, death," is spookily beautiful, vaguely unnerving...
...Thomas Hardy, he was amazed to discover, saw the world much as he himself did...
...Radio stations take notice...
...In between, he fought with his manuscripts, still working slowly but producing a tidy corpus of pieces that reflects a hard-won store of learning and consecration...
...Finzi was of Italian-Jewish ancestry, but his music...
...His clarinet concerto is another of his signature pieces, now a staple of that instrument's repertory...
...Dies Natalis is his major work...
...In 1946, Finzi was commissioned by the BBC to compose incidental music for a broadcast of Love's Labours Lost...
...sure path to glory...
...As he approached his mid-30s, he was near total collapse...
...Pure Finsey— nothing could be more English...
...It is the kind of piece that has long been out of style: a five-movement cantata for high voice (either soprano or tenor) and string orchestra, a paean to the life of God's creating...
...He labored at it intermittently from 1926 until 1939, when he at last permitted it to be heard...
...It has that oxymoronic quality, peculiar to British music, that I can only call chipper somberness...
...He was born in Yorkshire to wealthy parents who had scant interest in the arts...
...Seldom did he compose music that lacked an explicit religious purpose, and even when he did, he endowed it with a religious sensibility that seemed inseparable from his nature...
...then searching, pensive, wise...
...For all its profundity and skill, there is a whiff of intel-lectualism about it, and intellectual-ism is fatal to music...
...Who is Sylvia...
...The words are Traherne's, from poems unearthed only in 1903...
...English performers have looked after him, and they will continue to do so: They are ardent musical nationalists, not to say protectionists, and they are unapologetic about pushing their own...
...Lo, the full, final Sacrifice" is a daring work, tinged with chromaticism, and "God is gone up" is one of those rounded Anglican shouts for joy...
...He will never dislodge Elgar as Britain's musical titan—nor should he—but he has earned his modest tile on the stage...
...Articles are written, later books...
...The final song, "It was a lover and his lass" (a pet lyric of many a British composer), fairly quivers with delight, playful yet not a plaything...
...Dies Natalis is often described as "bathed in light," and so it is—an ethereal composition by a spiritual striver...
...The Finzi hour, richly deserved, is here, not soon to expire...
Vol. 3 • November 1997 • No. 8
