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Christopher ‘Kiffer’ Finzi, conductor who had an intense affair with his wife’s sister, the cellist Jacqueline du Pré – obituary
Christopher “Kiffer” Finzi, who has died aged 85, was the elder son of the composer Gerald Finzi and, after his father’s death in 1956, did much to help establish his reputation, both through a trust founded by his mother, of which he was chairman from 1981 and 1997, and as a conductor.
An unorthodox figure, once described as “somewhere between a gentleman farmer and a 1970s hippie”, Finzi was married to Hilary du Pré, a flautist and older sister of the cellist Jacqueline du Pré; they had four children.
In 1997, however, Hilary and her brother Piers wrote A Genius in the Family, a memoir in which they claimed that in the early 1970s Jacqueline, in a fit of depression and desperation, insisted that she have sex with Kiffer Finzi.
This odd relationship – conducted, according to Hilary, with her eventual agreement – lasted for about 16 months spanning 1971 and 1972, when Jacqueline was already married to the pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim and shortly before she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, the illness from which she would die in 1987, aged 42.
The memoir and, particularly, the 1998 film Hilary and Jackie, based on interviews with Hilary and Piers and starring Emily Watson and Rachel Griffiths as Jacqueline and Hilary, with David Morrissey as Kiffer, ignited a furore among many who had known Jacqueline.
They accused the film makers and Hilary of sullying the memory of one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century by presenting her as an unstable, manipulative and voracious woman.
Some of Jacqueline’s closest colleagues (including Mstislav Rostropovich) sent a furious letter to The Times; Daniel Barenboim wondered why people could not have waited until he was dead; Clare Finzi, Kiffer and Hilary’s daughter, charged that the film was a “gross misinterpretation, which I cannot let go unchallenged”. Students from the Royal College of Music picketed the premiere.
Hilary, however, continued to defend both the book and the film, while Kiffer saw nothing to apologise for, claiming, in an interview in The Sunday Telegraph in 1999, that the ménage à trois had been a good thing for all concerned.
Clare Finzi, however, spoke of her distress about the family’s linen being aired in public, and provided a darker interpretation of the relationship. “My father had several affairs, tending to choose women who were lost and unsure of themselves,” she was quoted as saying.
In an interview with The Independent, the film-maker Christopher Nupen, a friend of Jacqueline’s, described the Finzi household as more or less a commune in the period of free love, when “everybody slept with everybody”. Kiffer, Nupen maintained, “was regarded as something of a guru and his therapy for everyone who came to him for advice was to take them to bed.”
Christopher Finzi, always known as “Kiffer”, was born on July 12 1934 at Downshire Hill, Hampstead. His parents, Gerald and Joy, also had a house at Aldbourne in Wiltshire and in 1935 they sold their London home and settled at Aldbourne, where Kiffer and his younger brother Nigel, born in 1936, spent their early years.
In 1939 the Finzis moved to Church Farm, Ashmansworth, a few miles south-west of Newbury, where in 1940 Gerald founded a small orchestra called the Newbury String Players. Though largely amateur, it had a lasting influence for its role in performing works by neglected British composers, as well as its founder’s compositions.
The Finzi household was cultured and unconventional. Gerald Finzi had gained a reputation not only as a fine composer but also as a man of broad interests, which included cultivating rare species of apple on his farm; his wife Joy was a sculptor, artist and poet. Ralph Vaughan Williams was a close friend, and other visitors to Church Farm included the poets Edmund Blunden and John Betjeman and the guitar virtuoso Julian Bream.
The Finzi boys were educated at the progressive boarding school Bedales and, like his father, Kiffer became a pacifist, spending a short time in jail for refusing to do National Service.
He attended the Royal Academy of Music and embarked on a career as a freelance cellist. When his father died in 1956, Kiffer inherited the estate at Ashmansworth and took over as conductor of the Newbury String Players. He also helped his mother to establish the Finzi Trust.
Later, from 1971 to 1997, he conducted the North Wiltshire Orchestra, another amateur ensemble which he developed into a full symphony orchestra. Finzi first met the 17-year-old Hilary du Pré when she was performing with the Royal Academy orchestra at a concert in Newbury. He was conducting the Newbury String Players in the same concert and he soon became a frequent visitor to the du Pré home in Portland Place, London.
Both Hilary and her younger sister Jacqueline were captivated by Kiffer’s confident unpredictability. According to Jacqueline du Pré’s biographer Elizabeth Wilson, Finzi was the first to take the du Pré girls out to restaurants and cinemas, causing eyebrows to be raised at home when he delivered them back late in the evening.
Kiffer and Hilary were married in 1961 and the first of their four children was born in 1963. In 1967 Jacqueline married Daniel Barenboim, but within four years the couple’s relentless touring life was beginning to take a toll on the marriage, and hints of what would eventually be diagnosed as MS manifested themselves in Jacqueline suffering sporadic numbness and dizzy spells.
In 1971, officially suffering from nervous exhaustion, she moved in to live with her sister and brother-in-law at Church Farm.
Hilary claimed that she had foreseen her sister’s affair with her husband, recalling an occasion when Finzi called at the du Pré home in Portland Place one morning at 10 o’clock and on being told that Jacqueline was still asleep, ran upstairs, hauled her out of bed, slung her over his shoulder and brought her down.
“Jackie just laughed,” Hilary recalled. “And I knew … that something had happened. It was a sort of flash … When he threw her over his shoulder that morning in Portland Place, I knew then.”
The warning signs became more alarming when Hilary woke up one night to find that Jacqueline had crept into the marital bed and was doing her best to rouse Finzi, before Hilary interposed a protective hand. Later Finzi told her that Jacqueline had begged him to go to bed with her – “and so he had”.
As the affair progressed, Finzi would retire with Hilary to their bedroom. But in the early hours, with Hilary’s apparent acquiescence, he would slip into Jacqueline’s room, returning to his wife at dawn.
“We were just totally entwined,” Finzi said. “When you get close to someone all judgments disappear. You just become them and they become you.”
It seems that Hilary, who was looking after their young children as well as her grandmother and Finzi’s mother, who lived with them, felt she had little choice but to accept the arrangement, rationalising it as a means of seeing her sister through a crisis. “I adored Jackie so much, I would have done anything for her,” she told an interviewer.
Feelings of guilt, Finzi told The Sunday Telegraph, never came into it, since the sisters never experienced jealousy. Yet Hilary wrote: “It seemed to me that Jackie had unconsciously always been a cuckoo in the nest. First in childhood, when everything revolved around her. Later, in music, as I lost my confidence in the wake of her genius … now she was in my home, absorbed by my family, trying to take my husband away.”
“I just had to cope with it silently … But because I knew it was happening for the very best reasons, because it was the only way Jackie could possibly survive at that time, it wasn’t difficult. It was often painful, but it wasn’t difficult.”
By Hilary’s account, her husband’s affair with Jacqueline ended after Finzi decided that Jacqueline “needed more than he was capable of giving her … and that she needed professional help”.
Elizabeth Wilson, on the other hand, claimed that Jacqueline had come to regard her brother-in-law “as a man who wielded his authority in a manipulative way and who had taken advantage of a woman in a distraught state.”
Together with his violinist brother Nigel, Kiffer Finzi remained a lifelong ambassador for his father’s music and for the art and poetry of his mother. He made recordings in his capacity as a conductor, including a performance of his father’s Dies Natalis, and music by Robin Milford and Edmund Rubbra.
He eventually turned his attention from music to farming, later operating a health food shop in Newbury with Hilary, to whom he remained married – extremely happily by her account.
Finzi expressed himself mildly surprised by the hostile reaction to A Genius in the Family and the film. “I sometimes wonder whether life is like a Greek drama where we are just pawns moved by forces beyond our control,” he mused.
Hilary and his children survive him.
Christopher “Kiffer” Finzi, born July 12 1934, died November 28 2019