ABSTRACT
While still in his teens he had rejected his heredity and chosen his environment, which he never ceased to compose alongside his music. Both music and environment were to be pursued as wholly indigenous English constructs. As we should say today, he invented himself. (Stephen Banfield)1
While Still in his Teens
It has often been written that the stimulus for Finzi’s Requiem da Camera, an early work for small mixed chorus, baritone soloist and chamber orchestra, was the death of Ernest Bristow Farrar (1885-1918), Finzi’s first teacher of composition, who was killed in action during World War One.2 A gifted musician and organist at Christ Church, Harrogate, where Finzi was living at the time, Farrar had studied with Charles Villiers Stanford at the Royal College of Music from 1905 to 1909. There, as a student in the intoxicating atmosphere of London, Farrar was surrounded by the best musical talent of his generation, none of whom was more important than Ralph Vaughan Williams, a rising composer during this period but later the prime representative of the English Musical Renaissance. It was this milieu and all that it represented to which the enthusiastic, urbane, and young Farrar introduced the impressionable and introverted Finzi, who had begun his pupilage in 1914 at the age of thirteen. Is it any wonder, then, that Finzi, already aware of the transience and uncertainty of life because of the untimely deaths of his father and three brothers, was deeply shocked when his mentor and friend was killed in battle only a few days after arriving in France? It had taken two years to prepare Farrar for the realities of battle and only two days on the Front to kill him; indeed, Farrar’s senseless death occurred only six weeks before the signing of the Armistice.
