Sound Bites: Gerald Finzi – 'A Severn Rhapsody'

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opZbMapBnzM

I have no right to write about classical music. Apart from being able to thrash out a few power chords on the guitar and muddle through the tablature of some of my favourite riffs, I'm no musician. In saying that, when it comes to classical music I know what I like, and I like this piece by Gerald Finzi. Finzi was a composer who loved poetry, and frequently set it to music. I've yet to fall in love with those pieces of his, which I find over-wrought and I think that in his attempt to add music to the music of language, he detracts from the power of both. Listening to Composer of the Week it would appear I'm not the only one who felt like this, with some critics suggesting that in putting poetry to music he was 'guilding the lily'. Hard to disagree with that.

And yet, we cannot deny his dedication to his craft as a composer, even if it did famously take him a long period of time to finish his pieces (he seemed to find the process of composing torturous). For some reason I find this very ingratiating, perhaps because I can relate all too well to leaving everything to the last minute and finishing a piece of writing just before the deadline. Indeed, there's a lot to like about Finzi's sensibility: his love of place; family; his independent, anti-establishment, anti-institutional spirit; and his love of growing apples (he actively preserved and grew rare breads at his self-built Berkshire home, which housed his orchard). And above all of this, there is a sense that he has been overlooked as a composer.

When we think of English composers we think of Vaughan-Williams and Elgar (both excellent in their own right) and yet Finzi, whose oeuvre perhaps never reached the same heights, still wrote with a great sense of harmony, melody and innovation. Although I prefer his music without words, such as 'A Severn Rhapsody', I'd argue you can still hear the poets he loved in there: the sensitivity to place of Wordsworth (Finzi wrote about the view from Chosen Hill in Gloucester being formative to his creative outlook); the sense of the ephemeral and melancholy we'd attribute to Hardy; and the sensuality of poets like Sylvia Townsend-Warner.

To "shake hands with a good friend over the centuries is a pleasant thing" said Finzi, and in 'A Severn Rhapsody' we can see (or rather hear) the handshakes with these aforementioned poets. I think of this piece as a musical representation of the Severn, its twists and turns, its rising and falling volume, the circling of red kites, herons and darting of swallows, all set against an emotional backdrop of Finzi's childhood reminiscence for the place.

"There is no room in the world... for second rate work" said Finzi, and, while all of his back catalogue may not be consistently of the highest calibre we've come to expect of some other twentieth century English composers, there's not doubt that 'A Severn Rhapsody' captures Finzi at his best.

T. S. Eliot, in The Dry Salvages, wrote:

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river

Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and

intractable...

In 'A Severn Rhapsody Gerald' Finzi gives us the 'intractable' 'strong brown god' of the river of his childhood, and arguably the river of himself, in a flowing, melodic manner that could be captured by no poem, not even one by Eliot himself.

"In the end we all come down to: born; works; died." wrote Finzi, near the end of his life, to a friend. While it's a rather grim summation, there's a lot of truth in it. However, one of the great things about art is that it outlives the artist, it carries on, like a river, like Finzi's Severn.