ABSTRACT
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. Finzi composed Requiem da Camera while he resided in one of the most beautiful regions of England, the Cotswolds, so marvelously attractive because of its topography and vernacular architecture. The twelve manuscripts of Requiem da Camera are housed in the Bodleian Library of Oxford University, together with all of Finzi's "published and unpublished works, with drafts, notes and unfinished pieces", where they were deposited after his death. The manuscripts disclose that Finzi thought about naming the work Elegies, for on two of the prefatory pages Requiem da Camera has been struck through and succeeded by Elegies with a question mark. Finzi expended considerable energy on the setting of Hardy's poem.
