Englishness, Jewishness, and the English Sound: Gerald Finzi and the English Musical Renaissance
Creators: name: Kuriyama, Zen Tadashi
Publisher: name: Brandeis University
Year: 2024
Subjects: English Music
English Musical Renaissance
Englishness
Gerald Finzi
Jewishness
Musicology
European Studies

description: Gerald Finzi (1901 - 1956), who belongs to the so-called English Musical Renaissance (1850 - 1950), was an English composer whose music has been called “quintessentially English” but has been traditionally judged of little consequence. Born a London Jew of Sephardic and Ashkenazi descent, Finzi rejected his Jewish heritage and identity at a time when both antisemitism and nationalism in Britain was at its peak. Like many of his post-Victorian colleagues who were swept up in the frenzy of creating a national school of music, Englishness was the name of his game. As a result, Jewishness was never a desired card, and Finzi spent his life hiding his hand well, burning family records and silencing family members. Diana McVeagh believes that during the Holocaust Finzi felt like he had to “atone”; Stephen Banfield similarly laments the “tragedy” that Finzi insisted on “essentializing himself as entirely English to the complete discountenance of his Jewishness.” Was Finzi’s rejected Jewish identity the catalyst for an ultra-pastoral English sound, as a way to distance himself from the former? What is the significance of a Jew—whose association has always been urbanity—writing in the epitome of English musical pastorality?
description: After an in-depth study on the English Musical Renaissance and Jewishness and antisemitism in Britain and how Finzi featured in both, I provide analyses of three songs from Finzi’s song cycle, A Young Man’s Exhortation, op. 14 (“A Young Man’s Exhortation,” “Ditty,” and “The Sigh”), with text by Thomas Hardy; and an analysis of the Aria from Farewell to Arms, op. 9, underscoring the “dissonance” of a Bachian influence and a German musical template. These works exemplify Finzi’s harnessing of the “national affect” of England—the fusion of nostalgia and pastorality. Further, consideration is given to Finzi’s anti-war pastoralism—he was a lifelong pacifist and a declared conscientious objector during the Second World War. This angle is accented by Finzi’s love of Bach and his revulsions of both Nazi Germany and his own German Ashkenazi roots.
description: The primary musical analytical lens applied to Finzi’s work is his unique contrapuntal style; one might call it free polyphony influenced by English fascination at the time with their Tudor musical roots. Bach’s influence is also apparent, in form, counterpoint, and melody. Finzi’s treatment of poetic text and pastoral melodies using a free-flowing Tudor polyphonic language tied with Bachian counterpoint render an almost saccharine version of English pastoralism. In light of Finzi’s urban associations as a Jew, I posit that perhaps such “cow-pat” English pastoral saturation was the point.
description: The central hermeneutic used in this study is that of Finzi’s Jewishness, building upon peripheral observations made in the existing scholarship on Finzi. I believe that elucidating the un-conventionalities of Finzi vis-à-vis his rejected Jewish heritage may offer tools to demystify Finzi and his musical vernacular. He was an English Jew born in the city during the most heightened period of antisemitism and nationalism in Britain. His music, however, oozes the pastoral, a sonic manifestation of the “green and pleasant” mirroring his own life, fleeing the city and making a dwelling in England’s most rural parts. This, I conclude, was perhaps his desire from the beginning: to be remembered as archetypally English through his music because he, the man, would never be.