The art of Gerald Finzi may seem modest in comparison to that of such strong musical personalities as Tippett and Britten. Nevertheless, in the case of his settings of Thomas Hardy, he achieved the kind of symbiotic relationship between music and words that is only otherwise found in the greatest of song composers – Schumann and Heine, for instance, or Hugo Wolf and Mörike. If, as is often said of Wolf and Mörike, the identification is so close that you almost forget who wrote the words and who the music, this is even more the case with Finzi and Hardy. Indeed, what might be considered a limitation in Finzi’s style – its reticence, its relative uniformity and lack of ostentation – in this context becomes a virtue, allowing space for Hardy’s tangled syntax and donnish circumlocutions to make their point, and matching them with its own organic undergrowth.
Finzi himself must have felt this, together with an emotional affinity that ran very deep, for no fewer than five of his song-cycles – more than half his entire vocal output – are settings of Hardy. Of his piano parts, few are pianistic in the normal way (the bright, military swagger of the hussar’s song Budmouth Dears is a characteristic exception). Rather, they suggest the counterpoint of a string orchestra – for which Finzi also had a strong penchant, composing another of his cycles, Dies Natalis, for that medium – or of a church organ. Indeed, the frequently ecclesiastical overtones (Finzi was also a fine composer of church music) serve to underline the deep biblical roots of Hardy’s language. Significantly, Finzi divides the ten songs into two groups of five, prefacing each with a Latin quote from the Psalms, again underlining the element of time: ‘Mane floreat, et transeat / Vespere dedicat, induret, et arescat’ (‘In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up / In the evening it is cut down and withereth’).
Composed in 1933, A Young Man’s Exhortation contains some of Finzi’s most beautifully lyrical writing for the voice. This certainly has something to do with his choice of tenor for this cycle – most of his better-known Hardy cycles are for baritone – but also with Finzi’s skilful exploitation of the upper register to underline key words and sentiments. Thus in the opening of the very first song, a series of rising intervals dwells successively on E flat (‘Call off’), F (‘joys’), G (‘crown the hour’), and finally top A (‘Blind glee’). Similarly, in the first verse of The Sigh the contour of the voice part exactly matches the progress of the encounter, from its timid beginning (‘Little head against my shoulder’) to the almost startled top G of ‘kiss’ – a note already anticipated by the piano’s own depiction of the sigh in the song’s introduction.
In one of the cycle’s most magical effects, The Sigh actually ends not in G, but with a Schubert-like shift to E major. It is as if time has dropped a tender veil over the singer’s reminiscence, and Finzi does something similar in the second verse of The Comet at Yell’ham, bringing the voice down to earth as it were from its previously astronomical tessitura. Both here and elsewhere it is evident that the apparent simplicity of Finzi’s style often conceals an unexpected, and undervalued, sophistication.
from notes by Roger Vignoles © 2005
Proud Songsters
Britten, Finzi & Tippett: Songs
Finzi: Earth and air and rain