Gerald Finzi: An English Composer

Gerald Finzi, best known for the cantata Dies Natalis and the Clarinet Concerto, was one of Britain’s most adored composers. His music is rooted in the tradition of Elgar, Sir Charles Parry, Vaughan Williams, and early twentieth-century composers who, like Ivor Gurney, revered songwriting as their principal means of expression.

In this witty and engaging biography, Stephen Banfield reveals the modest, quintessentially English composer as a more complex figure than he is often given credit for being. Finzi’s ambiguous relationship with his craft, his affluent and intellectual family, and his struggles with his Jewishness lent a mysterious and troubled quality to his life and work that, through the course of this challenging biography, invite us to question the notions of Englishness that he both so cherished and represented.