Our concert consists of two works that are very different from one another in sound, style, and sensation, despite being written less than 10 years apart by composers born within a year of each other.

 

Gerald Finzi (1901-1956) was no stranger to tragedy. By the time the English composer reached adulthood, he had already lost his father and two of his older brothers to physical and mental illness and another brother and his beloved music teacher Ernest Farrar had been killed in action in World War I. These deaths and their impact on Finzi’s understanding of the transience of life would have a profound impact on his music.

 

After Farrar’s death in 1918, Finzi began studying music and composing in earnest, eventually moving to London and meeting Gustav Holst, Arthur Bliss, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. All three composers had a profound impact on Finzi’s composition, but none so much as Vaughan Williams with whom he shared a deep love of English Folk music. Finzi gained a teaching post at the Royal Academy of Music where he taught for three years before marrying Joyce Black and retiring to the countryside in 1933.

 

After the move, Finzi devoted himself to apple growing, studying, and editing English Folk music. During this period he composed few works, among them his cantata Dies Natalis. In 1951 Finzi was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease and given five to ten years to live. Complications caused by developing chicken pox eventually led to his death in 1956, just two days after the first performance of his final work, his Cello Concerto.

 

In Terra Pax, written just two years before his death, is a beautiful summation of all that Finzi loved in his music, using both English poetry and a traditional English Christmas carol in its composition. Despite being an agnostic of Jewish descent, Finzi often used Christian texts in his works and In Terra Pax is no exception.

 

In Terra Pax is inspired by a Christmas eve night when a much younger Finzi climbed to the roof of a church to hear the midnight bells ring across the countryside.  The piece is bookended by two verses of Robert Bridges’ poem ‘Noel: Christmas Eve, 1913’, subtitled Pax hominibus bonae voluntatis (Peace and goodwill to all men), opening with a baritone soloist in the place of the poet standing on a hill imagining the very first Christmas as he hears the bells begin to ring. Then the choir enters, becoming the narrator of the Biblical text that fills the center of the piece, the nativity as told in the Book of Luke, with a soprano soloist acting as the angel delivering the news of Christ’s birth to the shepherds. As the choir, now in the role of the angelic choir, begins to rejoice, “Glory to God in the highest”, we too hear the pealing bells of the churches along with a small section of the traditional English Christmas carol “The First Nowell”. In spite of terminal illness and tremendous loss, Finzi saw beauty and joy and hope, even if only in the quiet hills of his home.

 

For Maurice Duruflè (1902-1986) music had always been a part of his life. At 10, he became a chorister at the Rouen Cathedral Choir School where he studied piano and Organ with Alexandre Guilmant. At 17, he moved to Paris where he began studying with Charles Tournemaire. At 18, he entered the  Conservetoire de Paris where he would earn First Prize, a diploma denoting high artistic proficiency, in organ, harmony, fugue, piano accompaniment, and composition. In 1943 he would become the Professor of Harmony at the school where he continued to teach until 1970.

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At age 25, in 1927, he became the assistant at Notre Dame at the nomination of Louis Vierne, who he would continue to assist at Notre Dame until Vierne’s death in 1937. Duruflè won multiple prizes for his performances at the organ including the Prix Blumenthal and premiered Francis Poulenc’s Organ Concerto after assisting in the registration of its organ part, and later toured the world performing with his wife and organ assitant Marie-Madeleine Chevalier. In 1975 he and his wife were injured in a car accident that would end their musical careers. In 1986, Duruflè died in his home at the age of 84.

 

Despite his impressive musical resume, the perfectionistic Duruflè would compose and publish very few works, most famously his Requiem.  The Requiem, composed between the years 1941 and 1947, incorporates disparate pieces of Duruflè’s musical history, taking the Gregorian chants and modal harmonies sung in his youth at Rouen Cathedral and combining them with classical organization, including an underlying modern harmony. Duruflè selected texts from the original service that focused on peace and rest, choosing not to set Dies Irae. In his own program note’s for the work Duruflè writes,

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“This Requiem is not an ethereal work which sings of detachment from earthly worries. It reflects in the immutable form of Christian prayer, the agony of man faced with the mystery of his ultimate end. It is often dramatic, or filled with resignation, or hope or terror, just as the words of the Scripture Themselves which are used in the liturgy. It tends to translate human feelings before the unexplainable or consoling destiny.”

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Despite their many differences, perhaps there is a small thread that travels through these works, that in the face of the awe inspiring unknown, the terrifyingly real, and the profoundly quiet, there is the possibility of peace.

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Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes