Biographical Background II

Howard Ferguson left the Royal College in 1928 having spent his final year under the guidance of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) - a kindly, encouraging, yet ultimately less helpful composition teacher than the more acerbic R.0. Morris had been. Although the 0xford University Press had already accepted his Five Irish Folk Tunes for publication and he had begun work on the Two Ballads for baritone and orchestra, he realized that he would never be prolific. He therefore decided to work also as a performer of chamber music. To this end he formed a piano trio with Eda Kersey (violin) and Helen Just (cello) which was later expanded into The Ensemble Players. It was the experience of working with The Ensemble Players that led him in 1933 to compose the work that, together with his Violin Sonata No 1, made him famous: the 0ctet for two violins, viola, cello, double bass, clarinet, bassoon and horn. Through this time he lived with Harold Samuel - Pu and her niece Betty running the household and thus making possible their busy professional lives. The year 1936, however, proved to be particularly strenuous for Samuel. An adjudication tour of Canada, plus recitals in America, was followed by a South African tour. During the voyage home he suffered a heart attack, and though he seemed to rally his condition began to deteriorate and on 15 January he died. Ferguson, now Harold Samuel's principal heir, gave up their London home and for a while lived in the gardener's cottage at the site in North Hampshire where Finzi and his newly-married wife were planning to build a house. But this proved not entirely practical, and early in 1939 he took the lease on a property in the Hampstead Garden Suburb: 106 Wildwood Road. It was to be his home for the next 24 years. Finzi's progress, meanwhile, was relatively uncertain during this period. Struggles with a Violin Concerto for Sybil Eaton (with whom he was briefly infatuated) proved as exhausting as its first performance (4 May 1927) proved unsatisfactory, and the work joined the long list of pieces which he would tinker with over the years. Indeed, the strain of wrestling with it affected his health, and in the Spring of 1928 he was ordered to spend several months in the King Edward VII Sanatorium, near Midhurst in Sussex, on the grounds of suspected tuberculosis.

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