Gerald Finzi - Stephen Banfield

This is the first musical biography of one of Britain s best-loved composers. Gerald Finzi's music is rooted in the tradition of Elgar, Parry, Vaughan Williams and those composers in the opening decades of this century for whom song writing was a principal means of expression. While retaining a general picture of the modest, quintessentially English composer, Stephen Banfield's stylish, witty and acute biography reveals Finzi as a more complex and engaged figure than he is often given credit for. Finzi's ambiguous relationship with his craft, his affluent and intellectually stimulating family background, his Jewishness, lends a mysterious and troubled quality to his life and work.In almost everything he undertook, be it cultivating apple trees, collecting books, reading Hardy and setting him to music, editing Gurney's songs and poems, or performing 18th-century English music with his amateur string orchestra, Finzi responded to the idea of the mute inglorious Milton and the possibility of its transcendence.