Composer. Born in London, he first studied music with Ernest Farrar. While still an impressionable teen he was confronted with the deaths, within the space of a few years, of his father, three of his brothers, and his teacher Farrar (who was killed in World War I). These losses had a profound effect on his creative personality. Most of his music is elegiac in tone and the texts of his vocal works often speak of the fragility and transience of life. Painstaking and self-critical, Finzi withdrew an early Violin Concerto (after it had been conducted by Vaughan Williams) and refused to publish his 1924 "Requiem", written in memory of Farrar; the latter would not be heard until 1990. With the exception of the cantata "Die Natalis" (1940), all of his major works appeared after World War II: the brilliant Clarinet Concerto (1949), the cantatas "For St. Cecilia" (1947), "Intimations of Immortality" (1950), and "In Terra Pax" (1954), and the "Magnificat" (1952). Sadly, this surge of activity coincided with Finzi's declining health. In 1951 he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease and given five to ten years to live. A 1954 all-Finzi concert in London brought him belated recognition and led conductor Sir John Barbirolli to commission a Cello Concerto from him. Completed in 1955, it is Finzi's most ambitious composition and, after the Clarinet Concerto, his most popular. It was also his last. In September 1956, while on a walking tour of Gloucester with Vaughan Williams, Finzi contracted chicken pox from a sick child he visited; in his weakened condition it proved fatal. He died in an Oxford hospital hours after listening to the premiere of his Cello Concerto on the radio.