Critically acclaimed biography of one of England's best loved composers,
with a full discussion and evaluation of his works.
Gerald Finzi is one of the best-known modern English composers. While he
is especially famous as a song-writer, for his sensitive settings of
poets such as Hardy and Wordsworth, he also wrote in other genres;
notable works includethe exquisite cantata Dies Natalis, and his cello
concerto. He also exerted a major influence in the musical world as a
whole, championing the neglected Ivor Gurney and reviving
eighteenth-century composers with the amateur orchestra he founded.
In this lively and sensitive study of his life and works, Diana McVeagh,
the renowned Elgar and Finzi scholar, has made use of interviews with
the main figures in his life, correspondence with contemporaries such as
Vaughan Williams, Edmund Blunden, Arthur Bliss, Edmund Rubbra, Howard
Ferguson and Herbert Howells, and her access to previously unpublished
material in the form of his widow, Joy's, unpublished journal. The
Finzithat emerges is a multi-faceted and complex character. The author
shows how he developed from a solitary, introverted youth into a man
with strong views and a myriad of interests: everything from education,
pacifism, vegetarianism, to the Arts and Crafts movement, the English
pastoral tradition, English apple varieties, and the significance of
ancestry, friendship and marriage in an artist's life. She also
discusses every work within the narrative of Finzi's life, and shows
what makes his output so outstanding.
Diana McVeagh is the author of the highly acclaimed Elgar the Music
Maker [2007]; of the entries on Elgar and Finzi for The New Grove
Dictionary of Music and Musicians [1980, 2001]; and of the Finzi entry
in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [2004].
