Gerald Finzi

Large-scale compositions by Finzi include the cantata Dies natalis for solo voice and string orchestra, and his concertos for cello and clarinet.

[2] Farrar, a former pupil of Charles Villiers Stanford, was then aged thirty and he described Finzi as "very shy, but full of poetry".

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.

In 1925, at the suggestion of Adrian Boult, Finzi took a course in counterpoint with R. O. Morris and then moved to London, where he became friendly with Howard Ferguson and Edmund Rubbra.

Finzi never felt at home in London and, having married the artist Joyce Black, settled with her in Aldbourne, Wiltshire, where he devoted himself to composing and apple-growing, saving a number of rare English apple varieties from extinction.

His collection of about 700 volumes of 18th-century English music, including books, manuscripts and printed scores, is now held by the University of St Andrews.

[6] During the 1930s, Finzi composed only a few works, but it was in them, notably the cantata Dies natalis (1939) to texts by Thomas Traherne, that his fully mature style developed.

In 1939, the Finzis moved to Ashmansworth in Hampshire, where he founded the Newbury String Players, an amateur chamber orchestra that he conducted until his death, reviving 18th-century string music, as well as giving premieres of works by his contemporaries and offering talented young musicians such as Julian Bream and Kenneth Leighton the chance to perform.

The outbreak of World War II delayed the first performance of Dies natalis at the Three Choirs Festival, an event that could have established Finzi as a major composer.

In 1956, following an excursion near Gloucester with Vaughan Williams, Finzi developed shingles, probably as a result of immune suppression caused by Hodgkin's disease.

Finzi’s choral music includes the popular anthems Lo, the full, final sacrifice and God is gone up as well as unaccompanied partsongs, but he also wrote larger-scale choral works such as For St. Cecilia (text by Edmund Blunden), Intimations of Immortality (William Wordsworth) and the Christmas scene In terra pax (Robert Bridges and the Gospel of Luke), all from the last ten years of his life.

Finzi's younger son Nigel was a violinist, and worked closely with their mother in promoting his father's music.