Letters of Gerald Finzi and Howard Ferguson (review)

Letters of Gerald Finzi and Howard Ferguson. Edited by Howard Ferguson and Michael Hurd. Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 2001. [xiii, 310 p. ISBN 0-85115-823-4. $75.] Illustrations, indexes.

No two composers have ever been less likely to become friends than Gerald Finzi (1901-1956) and Howard Ferguson (1908- 1999). They met in 1926 through the brilliant pedagogue R. O. Morris, with whom they both studied at the time. Their friendship was sealed with mutual hilarity when they attended a performance of Richard Strauss's Eine Alpensinfonie, conducted by the composer, and watched the massive wind machine slowly topple over into the disconcerted orchestra. Ferguson, the younger of the two, was a superb pianist and possessed a lively and highly professional musical mind. Finzi, on the other hand, was a slow developer with a stubborn streak that retarded his progress as a composer. Despite his rudimentary skill as a pianist and other musical limitations, Finzi's tenacity enabled him to make steady, if dogged, advances in his career. While alacrity and curiosity marked Ferguson's attractive personality, Finzi possessed a truculent charisma that won him such friends as Ralph Vaughan Williams and the poet Edmund Blunden.

Finzi and Ferguson were prolific correspondents; they sent letters to one another from 1926 until Finzi's death in 1956. The Boydell Press has published a handsome collection of these letters, edited by the late Howard Ferguson with the expert assistance of Michael Hurd. These letters not only detail the two friends' opinions and aspirations but also provide an invaluable perspective on British music during the first half of the last century. A slight ambiguity hovers over the collection, however, for it is not altogether clear whether this volume represents a "collected letters" or an extensive selection from a larger body of correspondence. Ferguson, who was both musicologist and composer (and nobody's fool), was presumably aware of the effect this volume would have on his posthumous reputation, and may well have culled certain letters before embarking upon this edition.

A fascinating aspect of this volume is the evidence it provides of the richness and variety of English musical life between the wars. Ferguson and Finzi followed the latest trends in contemporary music, both within Britain and beyond, with an avidity that challenges conventional assumptions concerning the supposed insularity of the British musical establishment during this period. Both composers attended concerts of new music, purchased and exchanged contemporary scores, and listened to the performances of "ultra-modern" music that were frequently broadcast by the BBC. (For a thorough investigation of the presentation of modern music by the BBC, see Jennifer Doctor, The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922-1936 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999].)

Due to its candid tone and the temperamental differences between the two friends, this correspondence illuminates the characters of two remarkable British composers. On the evidence of these letters, Finzi seems to have been the more complex of the two, and prone to pontification, while Ferguson's potent charm fairly radiates from the page. Liberal in the broadest sense of the term, Finzi had a tendency to self-absorption that resulted in an inner opacity concerning his own motives.

Finzi, who came from a distinguished Jewish family, was highly ambivalent about his ethnic heritage, and his fierce embrace of English cultural traditions and values stemmed from his desire to assimilate completely into British society. Although Finzi was outspoken in his opposition to Nazism from the mid-1930s onward, it still comes as a shock to read his assessment of a 1933 concert given at the London Palladium by Duke Ellington: "Otherwise the whole show is pretty worthless. It, and the audience, made one feel there's something to be said for a Hitler" (p. 85). (Neither Ellington nor Hitler is listed in the index, oddly enough.) This remark poignantly reveals Finzi's internalized hostility toward his status as a Jew in a society and era prone to casual anti-Semitism, and explicates the...