Week Two - Gerald Finzi: Dies Natalis

Dies Natalis is a challenge. Not because of the music which is quite good and inventive but because of the texts written by Thomas Treherne (1637? -1674). I feel that to really appreciate this piece one must live with the text for a while as one would with poetry. I have only read the text as I listened for the first time and feel that I need more time to linger over it, to absorb it senza the music and only then to listen again.

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Now I'm ready!


1. Intrada - This is without voice and seems to me to be a preparation for the first poem to come in the next movement.  It shifts back and forth between being pensively lyrical and peacefully lyrical with a small climax about 3/4ths the way in. It's interesting that Finzi feels a need for this purely instrumental movement before coming to the fascinating and not always understandable prose and poetry of Traherne. Perhaps he is trying to shift the listeners state of consciousness to be more receptive to what is to come. There is no break between movements.

2. Rhapsody - There are some really stunning moments here. The text is three paragraphs from Traherne's Centuries of Meditations. It's not easy to understand who is speaking here. It begins with the line "Will you see the infancy of this sublime and celestial greatness?". The title, Dies Natalis, is Latin for "Natal Day" or "Day of Birth" but certainly, while much of it seems to be the voice of an infant, this is not only or even mostly coming from the perspective of a human infant. Consider this line, opening the second paragraph, "The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped nor was ever sown." Surely we are being addressed by a consciousness that, while being new to the world, is also paradoxically deeply ensconced in eternity; the last line of paragraph three; "Everything was at rest, free and immortal." Finzi's word painting is wonderful, and his setting of the first two lines of the second paragraph is magical, using long sustained chords to evoke the sense of being outside of time; "I thought it stood from everlasting to everlasting."

3. The Rapture - Here's the poem:

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Sweet Infancy!
O heavenly fire! O sacred Light!
How fair and bright!
How great am I
Whom the whole world doth magnify!

O heavenly Joy!
O great and sacred blessedness
Which I possess!
So great a joy
Who did into my arms convey?

From God above
Being sent, the gift doth me enflame,
To praise His Name.
The stars do move,
The sun doth shine, to show His Love.

O how divine
Am I! To all this sacred wealth
This life and health,
Who rais'd? Who mine
Did make the same! What hand divine!

This is an intensely joyful rapture, beginning with violins trilling excitedly then playing an burst of notes which lead back to the trill. The tenor comes in and the first stanza rings out with the strings moving things along with bass pizzacato and moving notes in the upper strings. The third stanza starts more reflectively but soon returns to the music of the first two stanzas. The really stunning moment happens after the third stanza when the orchestra builds and then stops unresolved for a moment of silence ... then resolves to a single note melting into a minor chord and the singer declaims "O how divine I am!" The last two lines are unaccompanied except for an abrupt, dramatic chord and then while "divine" is being held the strings enter with the same trill passage that began the movement. It all ends with a blazing major chord; arpeggios, then tremelos, then stuck all at once. Rapture indeed!

4. Wonder is a gentle, for the most part rather quiet, movement with lush string writing and long melodic lines. The poem has three stanzas but the music is through composed. In the poem there is very much the idea that all things are Divine. "How bright are all things here!" in the first stanza, and ending the poem, "I nothing in the world did know/But 'twas Divine." The musical climax is at the word "Divine", Finzi pointing out here, as he does elsewhere, the importance of this idea. The music is always flowing, shifting with interlocking lines and modulations, until the very end, taking this  listener on a beautiful journey of wonder.

5.  The Salutation

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These little limbs, these eyes and hands which here I find,

This panting heart wherewith my life begins;

Where have ye been? Behind what curtain were ye from me hid so long?

Where was, in what abyss, my new-made tongue?

When silent I, so many thousand, thousand years

Beneath the dust did in a chaos lie, how could I smiles, or tears,

Or lips, or hands, or eyes, or ears perceive?

Welcome, ye treasures which I now receive.

From dust I rise and out of nothing now awake,

These brighter regions which salute my eyes,

A gift from God I take, the earth, the seas, the light, the lofty skies,

The sun and stars are mine: if these I prize.

A stranger here, strange things doth meet, strange glory see,

Strange treasures lodged in this fair world appear,

Strange, all, and new to me: But that they mine should be who nothing was,

That strangest is of all; yet brought to pass.

There is a saying, I know not where it comes from, that God made the universe and especially humankind so that He/She could know himself/herself. This poem can be seen as fitting in with that idea. Who's talking in this poem? "When silent I, so many thousand, thousand years/Beneath the dust did in chaos lie," Who is this silent I that now is awakened in "These little limbs"? "From dust I rise and out of nothing now awake,". The poem gives no answer except to say that what is happening is Strange; strange that this 'silent I' should now perceive smiles, tears, lips, hands, or ears. We moderns all know that the stuff of our bodies were created in the stars. Could it be that Traherne intuited this in his own way; that the dust of stars becomes us? Really fascinating!
As for the music, it's wonderful. What more can I say? It's a beautiful, stately movement with a walking pizzicato bass throughout much of it. It is full of grace and ends simply and softly which seems to me to be the perfect ending to this marvelous work.

I listened to two recordings: James Gilchrist with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, David Hill conductor: and Wilfred Brown with the English Chamber Orchestra, Christopher Finzi conductor. Both very fine.

Here's a couple of interesting links about the meaning of  Dies Natalis and of Treherne's writings in general.
http://www.operatoday.com/content/2012/11/finzi_dies_nata.php
http://www.mum.edu/msvs/trahernepart1.html

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