Gerald Finzi (1901-1956)

Gerald (Raphael) Finzi born in London July 14 1901, became one of the most characteristically English composers of his generation. Despite being an agnostic, he wrote some inspired and imposing Christian choral music.

Finzi's father, a successful shipbroker, died when his son was seven. During World War I the family settled in Harrogate, and Gerald began to study music under Ernest Farrar - whose death at the Western Front affected him deeply. During these formative years he also suffered the loss of three of his brothers.

These adversities contributed to Finzi's bleak outlook on life, but he found solace in the poetry of Thomas Traherne and his favourite, Thomas Hardy, whose poems, as well as those by Christina Rossetti, he began to set to music. In the poetry of Hardy, Traherne, and later William Wordsworth, Finzi was attracted by the recurrent motif of the innocence of childhood corrupted by adult experience. From the very beginning, most of his music was elegiac in tone.

Finzi completed the first part of his musical education with the great organist and choirmaster Edward Bairstow at York Minster, a strict teacher compared with Farrar. In 1922, drawn to the English countryside, Finzi moved to Painswick in Gloucestershire, where he began composing in earnest. His first Hardy settings and the orchestral piece A Severn Rhapsody were soon performed in London to favourable reviews.

Then in 1925 on advice from the conductor Adrian Boult he moved to London to take counterpoint lessons with R.O Morris, one of the outstanding British teachers of the interwar years. He also became acquainted with Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose influence he was always to acknowledge and who in 1928 conducted Finzi's Violin Concerto. Other acquaintances in London included Holst, Bliss, Rubbra and Ferguson - who was to become a life-long friend.

In 1930 Finzi gained a teaching appointment at the Royal Academy of Music, but in 1933 gave up the post after his marriage to the artist Joyce Black and moved back to the countryside, to Aldbourne, Wiltshire. The same year saw a complete performance of the song-cycle A Young Man's Exhortation, his first noted success in London.

In 1951 Finzi learned that he was suffering from Hodgkin's Disease, a form of leukaemia, he died in an Oxford hospital on September 27 1956, the first performance of his Cello Concerto on the radio having been given the night before.