Gerald Finzi - An English Composer

Extract

An experienced writer on musical matters recently exclaimed: “I find it very difficult to write about Finzi's music—it's all so damned simple!” One can easily see what he meant. Who, for instance, in this year of grace, would dare to risk such a line as this in a major work:

This is certainly simple enough. Yet how else would one express in music Wordsworth's recollections of early childhood, the birds singing and the young lambs bounding? In the Angst of the twelve-tone system? In the “uncompromising” tight-lipped utterances of the mittel-European contemporary? It is only when we come to perform this music and hear it that we find we can do so without embarrassment.