Finzi's dedication to preservation extended beyond music; he also worked to rescue rare varieties of English apples from extinction.
Composer's Artistic Vision
Finzi's musical style, influenced by Vaughan Williams, Parry, Elgar, and Bach, features long, reflective melodic lines imbued with a characteristic melancholy and underlying darkness.
Composer's Artistic Vision
Finzi's character was shaped by a lonely childhood and an obsessive side, leading him to acquire an encyclopaedic knowledge of English poetry and literature, particularly Thomas Hardy and 17th-century Metaphysical poets.
Composer Biography
Gerald Finzi, born in London in 1901, experienced the deaths of his father, three brothers, and his mentor Ernest Farrar before he was eighteen, which deeply affected his perspective on life's fragility.
Composer Biography
Finzi was diagnosed with incurable cancer in 1951, composing his final major works, In terra pax and the Cello Concerto, under the shadow of this illness before his death in 1956.
Composer's Artistic Vision
Finzi ardently championed neglected composers like Ivor Gurney and Hubert Parry, and revived 18th-century English music by John Stanley and William Boyce, even founding an amateur orchestra, the Newbury String Players, in 1940.
