Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2023
Summary
Gerald Finzi and I first met in the autumn of 1926 at the house of R.O. Morris and his wife Jane. At that time Gerald was studying Sixteenth-Century Counterpoint (not composition) privately with R.O. (always so called because he disliked his names Reginald Owen), while I was R.O.'s pupil for harmony, counterpoint and composition at the Royal College of Music. A more significant meeting took place some weeks later (as recounted in my memoir, Music, Friends and Places(Thames Publishing, 1997), when we collided outside the Albert Hall after a concert conducted by Richard Strauss. From that moment we remained close friends until Gerald's death in 1956.
Gerald lived in a small house in Caroline Street, just behind Sloane Square station, while I lived with the pianist Harold Samuel, at first in Clarendon Road, Holland Park, and later in East Heath Road and Willoughby Road, Hampstead.
In 1928 Gerald told me the alarming news that he had tuberculosis, and would have to go into a sanatorium for some time. In fact, he entered the King Edward VII Sanatorium at Midhurst in Sussex in 1928, and remained there for four months.
I did not start to keep G.F.'s letters consistently until just before he went to the Sanatorium.
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- Letters of Gerald Finzi and Howard Ferguson , pp. xiii - xivPublisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2001