His death was announced on the 9.00 o’clock BBC evening news. He was fifty-five. Public obituaries and personal letters poured in. Two themes ran through them all: shock, for though he had recently looked less than healthy, few people had guessed he was fatally ill. The other was integrity: ‘This upright man’. He was cremated privately on 2 October 1956. Not until 1973, when her sister Mags died, did Joy scatter their ashes together on May Hill near Gloucester, which he had loved since his first visit in 1921. Reynolds Stone lettered the memorial which stands outside Ashmansworth church in 1956, and in 1975 Laurence Whistler engraved the window to celebrate fifty English composers (from John Dunstable to Britten, not just Finzi) in the church porch. A commemorative window by James Denny was installed in Gloucester Cathedral in 2016.

Joy, Kiffer, and Howard Ferguson gathered the twenty-six remaining complete but unpublished songs into four sets, two for high voice (Till Earth Outwears and Oh Fair to See), and two for low voice (I Said to Love and To a Poet). The Fall of the Leaf, after its long chequered composition, was produced on 11 December 1957 in Manchester, the scoring at last completed by Ferguson.

On 27 January 1957 there was a memorial concert at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Both Finzi's sons played in the Kalmar Orchestra, conducted by John Russell. The programme included Mudge's Concerto no. 4, and Dies Natalis sung by Eric Greene. There were two premieres: Kathleen Long played the Eclogue, and John Carol Case and Ferguson performed I Said to Love. At Ashmansworth that July Wilfred Brown and John Sumsion (Ferguson was engaged abroad) gave the first performances of Oh Fair to See and Till Earth Outwears to an audience of family and friends that included Edmund Blunden, Robin Milford, Toty de Navarro, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Laurence Whistler.

Kiffer took over conducting the NSP and in 1957 made a private recording of four of Stanley’ s Op. 2 concertos in Finzi's editions in which Nigel, Anna Shuttleworth, and John Russell played. Altogether under Gerald and Kiffer, NSP gave 379 concerts. Kiffer also saw the remaining editions of Boyce, Bond, and Mudge through the press.