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This is a biography of a composer whose music is rooted in the tradition of Elgar, Parry, Vaughan Williams and those composers in the opening decades of the 20th century for whom song writing was a principal means of expression. Finzi is now seen as he may have seen himself - as an artist whose limitations were innate and whose pastoral or provincial lifestyle and aspirations would reflect those limitations whilst somehow invalidating them.

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Chapter One From Padua to Harrogate On 1 February 1928, in an LSO concert at the Queen's Hall conducted by Vaughan Williams, Sybil Eaton gave the first complete performance of Gerald Finzi's Violin Concerto. This was in effect Finzi's London début, and the following day the Times critic referred to `a Concerto for violin and orchestra by one Finzi, who set us wondering why a composer of his name dealt so confidently in a definitely English idiom', adding, `The fact that Mr Finzi ... was present to bow acknowledgments at the end helped to solve the problem' (:10). Vaughan Williams sent a copy of the review to his brother-in-law, R. O. Morris, Finzi's counterpoint teacher, who replied to Finzi from Philadelphia: `What did make me angry was the insolent personal comment in the Times ' (19280208+?).     What did the Times reviewer mean? Was it simply that the composer's presence suggested British rather than overseas domicile? This alone would not have roused Morris's anger and could have been deduced from Finzi's first name, absent from the reviewer's comments. We are therefore led to assume that he or she found something significant in Finzi's appearance. Without being told what it was, we can only wonder whether on the platform he looked British or Italian, fully assimilated or conspicuously Jewish. Either way, we are now entitled to ask whether it was the question or Morris's refusal to countenance the question that was the more insolent. A year in the United States seems to have made little difference to Morris's perspective, which was that of his time, nation and class. Finzi himself emphatically shared it. While still in his teens he had rejected his heredity and chosen his environment, which he never ceased to compose alongside his music. Both music and environment were to be pursued as wholly indigenous English constructs. As we should say today, he invented himself. Perhaps he had to.     The invention worked, for Finzi still powerfully represents a restricted code of cultural nationalism, an ethos of island containment and uncompetitive self-sufficiency. Did he view this as a choice or a given? He modelled himself on the idea of the minor English poet, and we have come to see him as he probably saw himself: as an artist whose limitations were innate and whose pastoral or provincial lifestyle and aspirations would reflect those limitations while somehow invalidating them. In almost everything he undertook, be it cultivating apple trees, collecting books, reading Hardy and setting him to music, editing Gurney's songs and poems, or performing eighteenth-century English music with his amateur string orchestra, he responded to the idea of the `mute inglorious Milton' and the possibility of its transcendence. Yet in creating this world for himself he was relying on the very cornerstone he preferred to reject, that of birth, for in his case innate limitations were in reality innate resources. There was nothing minor about the achievements, social standing and finances of the family into which he was born and which nurtured him into secure economic freedom. A cynical view would be that he had it both ways; a sympathetic one that his background gave rise to tensions in his life and work which he unconsciously suppressed. To be fair to Finzi, he recognised his privilege and was anxious not to condemn the confines of those who had not enjoyed it, though he also recognised that achievement may depend on it. `As for the "mean-spirited" professors,' he wrote to Robin Milford in 1948, `perhaps the pressure of life, of competition, has been too much for spirits too frail to bear it. I don't like to think of how much worse I shd have been if I had not been a comparatively free man, for I cd never have earned my living as a musician, not even as a pedagogue; and how sour that might have turned me' (19480308b).     Finzi's relatives all belonged to respectable, prosperous and distinguished Jewish families that had been settled in England for several generations, Sephardi on his father's side, Ashkenazi on his mother's. The Sephardim, worshipping at the old Spanish and Portuguese synagogue in Bevis Marks in the City of London and sometimes making use of their own language, Ladino, were largely of Hispanic origin, though many of them had already dispersed (for instance to Italy, where the Finzis were and are most firmly established) long before the expulsions from the Iberian Peninsula of the 1490s. They had come and gone in Britain at various times according to the political climate but stayed after Cromwell gave them his blessing in 1656. Although not politically emancipated until the nineteenth century, they enjoyed, by and large, happy relations with the civic authorities in London and other mercantile cities such as Bristol, and the Bevis Marks synagogue was actually built for them by a Quaker (Jews were not allowed to join the construction guilds). The English Sephardim retained their dynastic and trading links with the continent and flourished greatly in the eighteenth century, but by the late nineteenth they represented `old money', an easy-going and sophisticated but declining cultural aristocracy, and were a `dwindling group' (Gartner 1960, 2/1973: 225), despite having thrown up several families and individuals who served their nation magnificently, including Disraeli (who, however, had converted to Christianity) and the Montefiores. Not that decline applied to Finzi's own family, whose wealth and status were comfortable, stable and almost certainly on the increase into his own generation.     Sephardi relations with the Ashkenazim, who originated from central and eastern Europe, were generally good, and there was plenty of intermarriage, particularly in the nineteenth century. The differences were and are primarily liturgical. However, the centrality of the synagogue and its leaders to Jewish family life and that of the whole community has meant that they have also been cultural, for example where customs in the naming of offspring are concerned. Families stayed overall within one tradition or the other, usually distinguishable by surname, and the `Sephardi cousinhood' has remained a tight-knit group, albeit one which has long been fully assimilated into British life.     There were Ashkenazim in Britain in the eighteenth century, but it was their huge waves of immigration in the later nineteenth that overlaid the older Sephardi culture. The London Jew of Dickensian imagination and prejudice was a poor East Ender and a relative newcomer, swarming, uprooted, living very much at the city's surface intersections, liable to sink or swim, and if able to swim, becoming very quickly upwardly mobile. There were undoubtedly social tensions between the `cousinhood' and the Ashkenazi `new money', flashy and upstart to Sephardi thinking which became all the more assimilationist as the highly visible growth of the Ashkenazi communities in London and other European cities triggered the great wave of latent anti-Semitism in the later nineteenth century that became manifest all too soon and all too widely.     If the Finzis did regard Gerald's mother's relatives as in any way arriviste or socially inferior, it cannot have made for any serious tensions, for the two sides mingled closely, supported each other, lived in the same road during Gerald's youth, and prospered alike financially. And if they eventually became differentiated in his own mind, it was partly through the chance patterns of bereavement, though, as with all aspects of his relationship to his heritage, we really do not know how or why his views and experience were formed in the course of childhood. Nevertheless, we do know that he had no time for his maternal uncles, and it was undoubtedly this side of the family which he associated with `a lot of infamous nonsense about banking' (19231103).     The Italian Finzis can be traced back to the fourteenth century, beginning with one Musetino del fu Museto de Finzi di Ancona `who was concerned in establishing the first Jewish money-lending office in Padua in 1369' (Elbogen 1903: 389). Formidably learned and enterprising by turns, they make it difficult for one to ignore the more far-reaching hereditary elements in Gerald's make-up, though he may not have known anything about his continental forebears and always violently repudiated the notion that blood is thicker than water. They were rabbis, astronomers, bankers, translators and physicians and spread east to the Balkans and as far as Jerusalem. Isaac Raphael Finzi's preaching in Ferrara in the eighteenth century was outstanding enough to attract Christians as well as Jews. The nineteenth-century Finzis included poets, lawyers, an Assyriologist and two patriots, one of whom, Ciro, died at the age of sixteen defending the Roman Republic in 1849, the other, Giuseppe, becoming the confidant of Mazzini and Garibaldi and a long-standing member of parliament.     As for the English Finzis, present in London from the eighteenth century onwards, some sources state that Gerald's great-grandfather's family came from Leghorn (Livorno), whose coral trade and connections with London as a rising centre of international finance in the early nineteenth century were certainly the reason for the transplantation of a number of Sephardi families to England, including the Montefiores. Most likely, however, it was Samuel Isaac Finzi from Ferrara who was that great-grandfather (Judah)'s father. Ferrara is still the city most associated with the Italian Finzis, because of Bassani's novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and its film. Samuel Isaac arrived in London in 1768, worked in a counting house, and died in 1807. Judah, whether or not he was his son, married a Portuguese widow, Simha Carvalho, in 1808, and it was their second son, Samuel Leon, who became Gerald's grandfather.     Samuel Leon Finzi (1811-95) was a `surgeon dentist', a common Sephardi profession in nineteenth-century Britain, and he designed a universal drill exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851. He was also a keen violinist and a member of the Beethoven Society. An only child from his first marriage died young, as did the mother. His second wife, whom he married in 1850, was Harriette Abraham (1821-95) from the Jewish community of Bristol, where her father was an optician. By the time she died, within a month of her husband, the couple, who produced five children, had seen three sons rise to prosperity, with all the family members living relatively near each other, evidently in some style, in substantial households in north-west London (Paddington, Maida Vale and St John's Wood).     Their first child, Haim Warburg, probably did not survive. The second was Leon (Judah) Moses Finzi, who became a well-known medical practitioner. He may have gone over to the Reform faith, for he does not feature in the Sephardi records. Third came Daniel (1853-1906), who got as close to music as publishing it for a living permitted. Evidently his business flourished, for by the time of the 1891 census he was `living on own means' with five servants in a six-storey house in Notting Hill, and in 1897 he moved further upmarket into Hamilton Terrace, St John's Wood, where he lived at Number 32, across the road and a few houses further down from where Jack Finzi established himself in the same year. Gerald would barely have remembered him, but his second wife lived on until 1945 and their children and granddaughter, Jean Finzi, kept within the Spanish and Portuguese congregation.     John Abraham (Jack) Finzi (1860--1909), Gerald's father, was the youngest of the five children. (There was also a girl, Esther [1855-1913], who seems to have kept a low, spinsterly profile.) A keen sportsman and naturalist -- butterflies were his speciality -- he had a good baritone voice. We are told that he was not a practising Jew; be that as it may, his cultural background was still firmly defined. He was educated at University College, London, founded in 1827 as `the first great educational institution [in Britain] to admit all classes and all creeds: Catholics, Jews and Dissenters were no longer debarred from taking degrees', and there, in addition to a firm friendship with Frank Heatherly, son of Thomas Heatherly who founded the Heatherly Art School, he made `the many and important ties between ... individual Jews' which were still a fact of life for him. One of these associations was with Raphael Meldola, a fellow entomologist. Meldola was `among the greatest English Jews' and, according to Henry Mond, `the greatest in science', discovering coal-tar dyes and producing in 1879 the first aniline blue (oxazine blue) dye, known as Meldola's Blue; and in 1913 he was awarded the annual Davy Medal for the most important discovery in chemistry made in Europe or Anglo-America (Emden 1944: 117, 122, 254). He was Gerald's godfather, his first name presumably accounting for Gerald's second (though it could equally well have been added, according to Sephardi custom, if he had become seriously ill at birth). Meldola's grandfather, also called Raphael, had, perhaps like Judah Finzi, come to London from Leghorn in 1805 and became Chief Rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue, his own grandfather having been Chief Rabbi of Pisa and his father Professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Paris. This provides an obvious parallel with the eminence of the Finzis, and that the connection should have been so strong in Gerald's father's generation is surely evidence of the continuing power of his Jewish intellectual and social ties. (Continues...) Copyright © 1998 Stephen Banfield. All rights reserved.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

In Britain, the works of Finzi (1901-56) are generally admired and oft-recorded, but his Anglophilic musical landscapes have not resonated as strongly with American audiences. Despite his native popularity, it has taken over 40 years for a full-length biography of the composer to be published. (John C. Dressler's Gerald Finzi, part of Greenwood's "Biobibliographies in Music" series, serves to introduce the composer's work. ) The Finzi Trust commissioned this work, but it retains a welcome tone of objectivity. Banfield (music, Univ. of Birmingham, UK) uses a staggering number of letters to and from Finzi, which shed light on a personality and artistic temperament more complex than often thought. Finzi's compositions reflect a strain of English Romanticism born of his love for the Hampshire countryside, yet his lifelong attempt to reconcile his "Englishness" with his Italian Jewish heritage led to an undercurrent of mystery and pathos in much of his work. Banfield's text proceeds chronologically, with numerous musical examples embedded throughout. Readers should come away with a greater appreciation of Finzi's large and varied output but may find the wealth of detail tedious. Recommended for larger undergraduate and graduate collections.DLarry Lipkis, Moravian Coll., Bethlehem, PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

Coming historically in the wake of the English musical renaissance of Elgar, Parry, Vaughan Williams, and Bliss, Finzi (1901^-56) added the influences of dissonance and atonality to his otherwise typically English musical style. His compositions had long gestations because he revised his sketches right up to a work's premiere. Accordingly, his published output is encompassed by only 40 opus numbers, but each successive piece shows him maturing musically. His vocal music includes song settings of many poems by Thomas Hardy and Intimations of Immortality, based on Wordsworth's great ode. In his later years, he edited works by early English composers, including Boyce, organized Parry's music, and collected species of old apple trees. Banfield lengthily analyzes Finzi's works, including the histories of their composition, to present a complete picture of the music as the entree to Finzi's thoughts and motivations. Although the book is addressed primarily to musicologists, any student of modern English music will learn from it how Finzi's music functions as a bridge from Elgar and Parry to Britten and Tippett. --Alan Hirsch