Serotinal dismay

Monday was the hottest day of the year, so I was forced to turn toward some autumnal music to keep from falling into an Indian Summer depression. I went to two different pieces of music, both inspired by autumn but written about 200 years apart.

Once upon a time Vivaldi’s Four Seasons held pride of place in my classical heart, but those days are long gone. I know not when I stopped listening to Vivaldi’s seasonal ruminations on a daily basis.

It matters not because on a triple-digit day in late September I found myself basking in the harvesting heat of Vivaldi’s Autumn. For it is less a contemplation on the descent toward winter and more a celebration of summer’s residual bounty — until the second movement.

The tone changes and we are faced with a forest of lamentations as leaves of darkest red and orange descend to blanket the ground with the expiring — damn it, the peasants interrupt this picture of decay with a frolicking dance. How distasteful.

Being Italian, Vivaldi can’t help but infuse his music with la dolce vita. However, Gerald Finzi is not Italian but English. Now here’s a man who knows the gloom for which I so desperately long.

As the most pastoral composer in a generation that excreted pastoralists like a cow leaving patties in a pasture, Finzi’s music always has an autumnal tone. Some may argue that the dear George Butterworth exceeds Finzi’s pastorality. Fine and good.

Finzi’s The Fall of the Leaf is not all rotting vegetation and despair. This piece contains some of his most dynamic and forceful music. I cannot pretend to find a program in Finzi’s music. All I can say is that it assuaged my serotinal dismay.