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I praise the tender flower - Gerald Finzi
Sung by ‘Viva la Musica’, East Midlands Chamber Choir
📶www.vivalamusica.org.uk/
Conducted by Simon Lumby📶www.simonlumby.co.uk/
Recorded live in Saint George’s Parish Church, Ticknall, Derbyshire - May 2024
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Born in England in 1901, the reclusive and introspective composer Gerald Finzi lived only 55 years, dying before his time from leukaemia. During his brief life, he dedicated himself to music. Much of his time was spent composing, attending concerts, lecturing, collecting music, and befriending the likes of Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams. His output includes orchestral and choral music as well as many solo songs and essays. He shows a brilliance in the way he sets words by finding the essence of the text without the need for over-embellishment (indeed, much of his vocal music is primarily set syllabically).
Finzi himself was dissatisfied with his setting of the Seven poems of Robert Bridges (from which this piece is taken), as a letter to his friend Robin Milford shows. One difficulty here is that Bridges was almost exclusively a poet of the first person singular, so that setting his lyric poems chorally requires a composer to preserve the sense of a single composite voice. Finzi’s scrupulous respect for text shows in his limiting the imitative divergences whereby textures can be enlivened and pacing regulated-but words potentially obfuscated. Since songs one to six are all in a major key, and the seventh ambivalently poised between minor and major, it cannot be said that Finzi made things easier for himself.
The setting of ‘I praise the tender flower’ is a wide-ranging quintessentially English (quite simple and straight forward) setting of the lyrical poetry by Robert Bridges.
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Text:
I praise the tender flower,
That on a mournful day
Bloomed in my garden bower
And made the winter gay.
Its loveliness contented
My heart tormented.
I praise the gentle maid
Whose happy voice and smile
To confidence betrayed
My doleful heart awhile;
And gave my spirit deploring
Fresh wings for soaring.
The maid for very fear
Of love I durst not tell:
The rose could never hear,
Though I bespake her well:
So in my song I bind them
For all to find them.