Gerald Finzi: Dies Natalis

Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast

Host Joshua Weilerstein introduces a Patreon-sponsored deep dive into 20th-century British composer Gerald Finzi and his 1939 choral-orchestral masterpiece, Dies

Key takeaways

• Gerald Finzi (1901–1956) composed Dies Natalis in 1939, drawing heavily from 17th-century poet Thomas Traherne while stripping away explicit religious references to create a philosophical meditation on innocence and loss.
• The work features solo voice and strings, utilizing crunchy dissonances and unresolved harmonies that contrast with its tonal foundation, reflecting the anxious pre-WWII atmosphere.

Main topics

• Gerald Finzi biography
• Dies Natalis musical analysis

Notable quotes

"Finzi was a person obsessed with the past, whether that was older English literature and poetry or English Baroque music."

Conclusion

The episode offers listeners a compelling entry point into Finzi's ove

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:07) Hello and welcome to Sticky Notes, the classical music podcast. My name is Joshua Weilerstein, I'm a conductor, and I'm the music director of the Orchestre National de Lille and the chief conductor of the Aalborg Symphony. This podcast is for anyone who loves classical music, works in the field, or is just getting ready to dive into this amazing world of incredible music. Before we get started, I want to thank my new Patreon sponsors, Carol, Tim, Shaina, Robert, David, Simon, and Jennifer. and all of my other Patreon sponsors for making Season 10 possible. If you'd like to support the show, please head over to patreon.com slash stickynotespodcast. And if you are a fan of the show, please take a moment to give us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It is greatly appreciated. I want to mention that this is the second to last episode of season 10. That is because my wife and I are about to have our second child, and so I'm going to be going on a kind of paternity leave from the podcast. But that doesn't mean the podcast is going to stop entirely. I'm going to be continuing my Schubert mini-episodes on Patreon, and I am going to be having all of my Beethoven symphonies episodes. remixed by the great Charlie Cosella, who has been working with me on all of the recent episodes of the podcast, and I've gotten a lot of wonderful feedback about the sound now. So we'll be re-releasing those over the next few months. We'll have one more episode in a couple of weeks on Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony, and then we'll go on this break, but it won't really feel like a break for you, because you'll be hearing lots of Beethoven symphonies again, and then Season 11 will be beginning with new episodes probably in March, maybe a little bit before that. We'll see how things are going. But really, in the meantime, you're going to be getting all nine Beethoven symphonies in beautiful, wonderful Charlie Cosella sound. So thank you all so much, as always, for all of your support of the show. And I can't wait to start season 11. I've got already a lot of really fun episodes planned. Some big stuff like Mahler 8, Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe, some other stuff that I won't even tell you yet at the moment. But I'm really excited for it. And thank you again for listening to the show. And I'm also very happy to be sharing with you today. Gerald Finzi's Dies Natalis. Thanks. Speaker 1 (2:50) As I've often said, I love doing Patreon-sponsored episodes, in part because they allow me to discover music I might never have been familiar with otherwise. Today's episode is one of those episodes, because the truth is that before I made this show today, I had heard of Finzi, but that was about it. I knew nothing about the circumstances of his life or about his music, and while I knew this was a hole in my musical knowledge, it was one that I hadn't had time to fill. Well, thanks to Jillian, I got the time to explore this wonderful 20th century composer's works, and now I'm ready to tell you about him, since I imagine he is an unfamiliar name to many of you listening. Gerald Finzi was a terrific composer and a fascinating figure in 20th century music. He struck out on his own path, refusing to follow the trends of the times, and therefore his music has a special, unique quality. A bit more modest than someone who was trying to change the world like Schoenberg, but nonetheless music that was deeply human and often inspired by literary interests. Finzi was interested in much more than just music, and amassed a library of over 3,000 volumes of English poetry, philosophy, and literature, much of which ended up appearing in his music. And this powerful marriage of interests in poetry and music produced Finzi's strongest and most enduring works. And since Gillian left it up to me which work of Finzi's to tell you about today, I decided to lean into this love Finzi had for English poetry, and to take a detailed look at a piece that many consider to be Finzi's masterpiece. Dies Natalis, which translates to Day of Birth. Speaker 1 (4:34) The piece is set to the poetry of the 17th century English metaphysical poet and priest Thomas Traherne, and discusses the topic of innocence, from the first moments a baby enters to the world to the tarnishing of that innocence as they grow older. This was a topic that Finzi knew all too well, considering the losses of all three of his brothers during his early years. The piece is a profound yet tender meditation on the joys and sufferings of new life. and I can't wait to share it with you today. All this and more is coming right up on Sticky Notes. Sticky Notes Speaker 1 (5:25) I wanted to give you a quick biographical look at Finzi because he's probably unfamiliar to most of you listeners. And as always, I think the biographies of composers are vital to understanding the music they composed. Finzi was born into a British Jewish family in 1901 and was quickly thrust into a world of loss. His father died before he turned eight, and he lost his beloved music teacher, Ernest Farrar, as well as his three brothers during World War I. His solace during these times was poetry, particularly that of Thomas Hardy, but also of Thomas Traherne, who will come up quite a bit later when we discuss Dies Natalis. He spent time in London where he got to know some of the leading lights of the British musical world, such as Vaughan Williams and Holst. He got a teaching post in London largely thanks to Vaughan Williams, but disliked the big city. and after getting married, he returned to the country with his wife, where he was able to explore his other interests, such as amassing that huge library, but also being involved with collecting rare varieties of English apples and attempting to save them from extinction. Throughout this time, Finzi was developing his compositional style, and this culminated in Dies Natalis, written in 1939, when Finzi was 38 years old. After World War II, Finzi's popularity as a composer began to rise further, but this was all cut short when Finzi received a diagnosis of Hodgkin's disease, which doctors said gave him 5-10 years left to live. Composing furiously during this period, Finzi completed some of his best works, including a cello concerto which was premiered the day before his death in 1956. Speaker 1 (7:40) Finzi was a person obsessed with the past, whether that was older English literature and poetry or English Baroque music, which Finzi vigorously attempted to bring back into the consciousness of British audiences. This is the context that brings us to Dies Natalis and to Thomas Traherne. As I said in the intro, Traherne was a 17th century English poet as well as a priest, and Finzi was enamored with his poetry. But for the piece Dies Natalis, Finzi treats Traherne's work very freely. In a wonderful essay on this piece by Matthew McCullough, McCullough points this out when writing about one of the movements in Dies Natalis. Quote, For the Rhapsody, Finzi chose only those paragraphs that he wished from the prose of the first three verses of the third century. From Traherne's original text, Finzi has removed almost all references to religion and the glorification of God. Those which he does keep in the new adapted context portray the deity in a quasi-metaphoric manner, thus removing the religious affiliations within the text, thereby creating a philosophical and metaphysical undertone. Let's head into the piece now, looking for that philosophical and metaphysical undertone. Dias Natalis is a five-movement work, and the orchestration is important. Solo voice and strings. This immediately creates a tenderness that is palpable throughout the piece. The solo voice can be a soprano or a tenor, though it