Finzi's working life, 1920 to 1956, encompassed the jazz age, Gebrauchsmusik, neo-Classicism, Neue Sachlichkeit, the rise and hegemony of serialism, the beginnings of electronic music, and many another fad and fashion making the motley fabric of Modernism, all heard, if heard at all, from the great distance of the English countryside where seasonal procession enacts the fragile beauty and transience of human life reflected in his conservatively tonal music. He was the type of diligent scholar, the artist savant, whose intense cultivation of English pastorale produced a minor but evergreen body of work in which the lives of country folk, their fleeting joys, the drama of aging, the vicissitudes of memory, and missed opportunity are caught in a timeless utterance. Vocal music comprises roughly two thirds of Finzi's output, and of some 60 songs for solo voice and piano, over half are settings of poems by Thomas Hardy.

The ten songs of A Young Man's Exhortation are divided into two equal parts, each headed by an inscription in the Latin of the Vulgate—Mane floreat, et transeat, Psalm 89 (Psalm 90 of the King James Bible, "In the morning it flourisheth and groweth up"); and Vespere decidat, induret, et arescat (ibid., "In the evening it is cut down, and withereth"). Composed between 1926 and 1929, the songs were published in 1933—the year of his marriage to artist Joyce Black—the only one of Finzi's vocal collections intended as a cycle. If Hardy's poignantly wry, grotesquely moving observations make his verse the authentic voice of rural England, his often knotted syntax militates against musical setting. But Finzi takes him in a musical prose employing the simplest means—a vocal line hovering between arioso and declamation supported by an open, seemingly improvised accompaniment, often no more than two voices in imitative arabesques dimpled with nuance or dilating with deft suggestion, to point the poem's movement and project its punch in melancholy meditations. Rarely, but tunefully, as in "Budmouth Dears" ("When we lay where Budmouth Beach is, O, the girls were fresh as peaches…"—the performing indication is "Storming march"), Finzi yields up something like a conventional song. And in "The Comet at Yell'ham", he touches, in the fewest of notes, the sidereal mystery in which lives are rapt. Far from the madding crowd, as Hardy has it, Finzi's sturdily exquisite art sings a song of the earth which, if bittersweet in its grasp of the eternal verities, is also reassuring.

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