Roads Less Traveled: Rediscovering the Baritone Song Sets of Gerald Finzi

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND WHEN SELECTING ENGLISH ART SONG for male voices, the songs of Gerald Finzi (1901-1956) are often overlooked. With the exception of Let Us Garlands Bring, a set of five Shakespeare songs, Finzi's works are rarely included in standard vocal anthologies and are programmed less frequently than Vaughan Williams and Quilter. Yet these song sets provide a wonderful opportunity to explore Finzi's rich harmonic language and his sensitive poetic settings, particularly those of Thomas Hardy. This overview provides the singer with an introduction to Finzi, his compositional style, and his six song sets for baritone voice. Musical and pedagogic characteristics, range, and level of difficulty are noted, and a selected discography is included. Gerald Raphael Finzi was born in London, England, on July 14, 1901. As the fifth and youngest child of an English shipbroker, Finzi experienced tragedy early in life. His father died of cancer when Finzi was seven years old, and his three older brothers also died early. His wife, Joyce ("Joy"), recalled that the remainder of Finzi's family, an elder sister and his mother, never completely understood his desire to compose.1 Nevertheless, as a teenager, Finzi expressed an interest in music. He studied composition with Ernest Farrer from 1914-1916, and then with Sir Edward Bairstow until 1922. In that year, Finzi moved to Painswick in Gloucestershire (the countryside of Elgar, Gurney, and Vaughan Williams), in order to isolate himself for study and composition. He returned to London in 1925 to study counterpoint with the noted theorist, Reginald Owen Morris. With the exception of these brief periods of formal music study, Finzi was a self-taught musician, a path that was highly atypical for British composers of his generation. Likewise, his general education proved unusual. Failing to adjust well to preparatory school and stunned by the death of Farrer during World War I along with so many of his family during this time, Finzi drew inward.2 Diana McVeagh suggests that these experiences "confirmed his introspective bent, his recourse to literature, and the sense of urgency in his dedication to music.3 Finzi's many hours of solitude were filled with a fascination for literature, especially poetry. Throughout his life, he amassed a huge library that contained more books than musical scores. Finzi's London years (1925 through the early 1930s) were filled with visits to theaters, art galleries, and concerts, including the premiers of new music by contemporary British composers. Pinzi met Holst and Vaughan Williams during this time, and his circle of musical friends included Edmund Duncan-Rubbra and Howard Ferguson. Ferguson remained a close friend of Finzi throughout the latters life and continued to be a proponent of Finzi's music long after the composer's death. As composers they sought each other's advice; and, beginning in the 1920s, together with Marion Scott and others, they were instrumental in collecting and editing many of Ivor Gurney's songs. Finzis only conservatory post was as a composition teacher at the Royal Academy of Music from 1930 to 1933. Apart from this position, Finzi spent his entire career as a freelance composer, preferring to work alone in the English countryside rather than be associated with the musical circles of Britain's major cities. McVeagh maintains that some of Finzi's freshest, most individual music was written during this early period of the 1920s and 1930s, including the celebrated tenor song cycle, A Young Man's Exhortation (composed between 1926 and 1929); the baritone collection, Earth and Air and Rain (1929-1932); and the cantata for high voice, Dies Natalis (1926; 1938-1939). Songs later incorporated into the sets To a Poet, Let Us Garlands Bring, and I Said to Love were also written during this time. Finzi married Joyce Black, a sculptress, in 1933. The couple moved to Aldbourne in Wiltshire in 1935, and in 1937 built a home designed for their creative activities in the Hampshire hills at Ashmansworth. …