Gerald Finzi’s Letters, 1915-1956

English composers of the past century or more have generated several shelf feet of published letters. Benjamin Britten’s run to six stout volumes of around 800 pages each, though the apparatus is so dense and, it has to be said, the Britten industry so exhaustive that one is often hard put to it to find a letter among all the commentary. Edward Elgar sports four volumes, two for his publishers, one for “Windflower,” and one for Letters of a Lifetime. Several other selections have preceded and succeeded this Clarendon Press offering by the redoubtable Jerrold Northrop Moore. There are two sizable volumes of Frederick Delius’s Life in Letters, but only one, curiously organized by correspondent, for Michael Tippett, of whose interminable dream interpretations one can soon weary. William Walton has one volume, as does Ralph Vaughan Williams. In the latter case, Hugh Cobbe heroically surmounted his illegible handwriting and aversion to dates. Against this, no scholar has systematically tackled a Collected or Selected Bax, Rawsthorne, Berkeley (beyond a varied anthology of writings and interviews), Holst, Parry, Stanford, Bridge, Bliss, Lambert, Smyth, or Sullivan. Yet great care and resources have been lavished on certain minor composers whose published letters, it can plausibly be claimed, will give the greater pleasure when placed side by side with those of their more eminent colleagues. True, no Kleinmeister’s exchange will equal the awesome importance of August Jaeger’s with Elgar about the initially flunked climax of The Dream of Gerontius. But one looks with considerable affection on The Collected Letters of Ivor Gurney, edited by Kelsey Thornton; on the four handsome volumes of Peter Warlock’s letters edited by Barry Smith; and on the present edition of Gerald Finzi’s letters. Why do these men live so vividly in their correspondence? It is hardly that they were more rounded or normal human beings than their fellow-composers. One would not say that of any of the three. But they foster the idea that their performance of life was less a matter of instrumentality, of ambition through their medium—notes on the page, players and singers on the stage, devotees in the audience, publishers and patrons pulling the strings—than of creative innocence. They could not stop themselves from plucking wide-eyed from the tree whatever gave them the nearest enrichment, be it poetry, present music, past music, the romance and plenitude of nature, or the foibles of humans, and from emulating the bounty and orderliness of life’s gift to them. A song might emerge, or a scholarly edition of someone else’s, or a rambling poem, or an obscene limerick. A library or an orchard or a friendship or even an enmity might grow. A letter might be written. There is, I think, a fundamental happiness about this role in life, which is not