Frederick Delius

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I will probably watch it over the weekend, too. Perhaps I'll also listen to some Delius then...

For the newcomer, it's a good documentary, but I already knew most of the factual information that was covered, but it contained a few surprises and some rather humorous ones.

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-The Violin Sonatas-

Violin Sonata No. 1, RT viii/6:

"I cannot remember the first time when I began to play the piano: it must have been very early in my life," Delius recalled. "I played by ear, I used to be brought down in a little velvet suit after dinner to play for the company. My mother would say: 'Now make up something', and then I would improvise. When I was six or seven, I began taking violin lessons from Mr. Bauerkeller, of the Hallé Orchestra, who came over from Manchester especially to teach me." As an 18-year-old newly conscripted into the family wool business, Delius was sent to Germany, where commercial considerations took distant second place to concert attendance and violin lessons with prominent pedagogue Hans Sitt. Thereafter, his violin accompanied him through the vicissitudes of self-discovery and more failed tours as a commercial traveler. After the debacle of his venture as an orange grower in Florida, in the fall of 1885 the 23-year-old vagabond turned up in Danville, VA, in answer to a newspaper advertisement for a music teacher, and by October had established himself as "Professor" Delius. "I am sure it was charm, not teaching ability," Eric Fenby remarked, "that paid for his passage back to Europe in 1886, earned from giving violin lessons to the daughters of wealthy tobacco planters...." The consensus of his biographers is that, though talented, he would never have been more than third-rate and could not have made the cut as an orchestral player. Nevertheless, Delius confided his earliest articulate dreams and ambitions to the piano and violin, and it would have been surprising had he not left works for this combination. The pattern sketched in his recollections would follow him into his mature compositions, as in the violin sonatas, where a cavalier disregard for textbook form was compensated by a tendency to "wing it" in seemingly improvised flights. Delius is more cunning than that and his pieces are seldom shapeless, though their compelling trajectory is never amenable to conventional analysis. His imagination was rich enough that he could rely upon it, as in the First Violin Sonata. Sketched in 1905, the sonata was completed only in 1914. The meander of its rhapsodically dreaming first movement, playing nearly 12 minutes, can seem ramshackle, though its lyric flow is never less than ingratiating, while the animated second movement concludes the work in radiant winsomeness. It was premiered by Arthur Catterall and Robert Jeffrey Forbes in Manchester on February 24, 1915.

Violin Sonata No. 2, RT viii/9:

For Delius, the decade of the 1920s was a chronicle of wavering health and general decline, as the syphilitic infection he contracted in the 1890s began to tighten its grip. In 1920 he was still ambulatory, though his hands had become so shaky that he composed with difficulty and by dictation. In the spring, as a bout of illness made composition impossible, he accepted a commission from London impresario Basil Deane to furnish incidental music for a production of James Elroy Flecker's play Hassan. Delius worked quickly, but his penciled drafts had to be sent to Philip Heseltine (known to all lovers of English song as Peter Warlock) to be made into fair copies. Through 1921 his disease was largely in remission. He visited Frankfurt, London, Bradford, and spent the summer in Norway, where he had a chalet built overlooking the valley of Gudbrandsdal, near the village of Lesjaskog. But with the new year, as he turned 60, he grew very weak in his limbs and retired to a spa in Wiesbaden for an extended stay, during which he was forbidden to walk and forced to put Heseltine under contribution again for correction of proofs of his Cello Concerto. Another remission allowed him to take his summer holiday in Norway, in his new chalet, though he was now obliged to walk with the aid of canes. At Lesjaskog, he began his Violin Sonata No. 2. For Delius, the gregarious bon vivant, 1923 opened with a giddy social round in Frankfurt -- with visits by Percy Grainger and Hermann Scherchen -- made more enjoyable by concerts devoted to his works, though as summer came on he was again interrupted by disease, obliging him to make a two-and-a-half month stay at Bad Oeynhausen, a spa near Hannover. After a number of delays, Hassan was scheduled for fall production in London, though, as Deane informed Delius, more music would be required. During his Norwegian summer holiday he attempted to supply the want, though by now he composed by dictation to his wife. A visit by Grainger, who anonymously composed a missing dance number and put the manuscript additions in order, saved the day. Back in Grez in October, Delius completed the Second Violin Sonata begun the year before, though from the concentration and melodic generosity of its single-movement fast-slow-fast arch one could hardly guess the trying circumstances of its composition. The Wigmore Hall premiere was given by Albert Sammons, with Evleyn Howard Jones on October 7, 1924.

Violin Sonata No. 3, RT viii/10:

With the onset of the First World War, Delius embarked upon a more tightly integrated manner, loosely referent to textbook musical processes, with the First Violin Sonata (1914) and pursued with varying success in the Double Concerto for violin and cello, the Violin Concerto, the String Quartet, and the Cello Sonata -- all completed in 1916 -- the Cello Concerto (1921), and the Second and Third violin sonatas (1923 and 1930, respectively). But the designation sonata or concerto should lead no one to believe that they partake of the sonata form preoccupation of the great German tradition. The conception of the violin sonatas -- arguably, with the Violin Concerto and the Cello Sonata, the most successful of these works -- is soaringly lyrical, unfolding in seemingly improvised lines wholly unsuited (as Berlioz's long-limbed melodies are unsuited) to alla tedesca "working out" or development. Instead, Delius proceeds by repetition in other registers and new contexts, shifts of melodic inflection, the expansiveness with which a newly heard melodic flight may cascade into exquisite arabesques, or the sudden generous introduction of new material. While there are occasional moments of dialogue, the violin -- the singing instrument -- is clearly the primus inter pares, leaving the piano to sketch a rapidly shifting chromatic texture, often in the "exquisitely placed melody of chords" that Eric Fenby noted, resourcefully varied broken chord figurations, or melodic fragments that the violin seizes upon and carries aloft. For all their genial dreamery, joyousness, and radiance, the violin sonatas mark the increasing grip of Delius' syphilitic paralysis. Through the period of the First Sonata, Delius was experiencing more frequent and severe periods of illness, entailing increasing stretches of convalescence. The Second Sonata was dictated to his wife while he could still see. By 1930, Delius was blind, paralyzed -- a total invalid in almost constant pain -- and the Third Sonata was dictated to Fenby. In fact, the beguiling tune in 12/8 that opens the second movement was the first music Delius attempted with Fenby. Despite the composer's physical travails and the initial miscommunication between the composer and his young amanuensis, the Third Sonata is the blithest of the three -- "a younger, fresher work than either of the other two," according to its composer, after hearing his favorite interpreter, May Harrison, perform it, accompanied by Fenby on an Easter visit just after its completion. The work is dedicated to her. Harrison, with Arnold Bax, gave the sonata's Wigmore Hall premiere on November 6, 1930, and in 1937 privately recorded it.

[All articles taken from All Music Guide]

I couldn't find any information on the Violin Sonata in B (Op. Posth.). This particular sonata was composed in 1892 and is the longest of the four sonatas. It's still characteristically Delian, but with a brighter and perhaps even more of a Romantic influence than the others.

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Two Pieces for small orchestra:

The Two Pieces for small orchestra are exquisite tone poems depicting two adjacent seasons. They were written after Delius completed his last opera, Fennimore and Gerda, which demonstrated the shift to his later style of composition. These two works, however, also look back to his earlier, very personal style. Both are scored for a reduced orchestra of flute, oboe, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, and strings.

"On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring" (1912) opens on a beautiful sustained major seventh chord followed by the oboe introducing a pastoral bird-like pattern. Then "with easy flowing movement," a song in triple meter is introduced in the strings with drones in the cellos and basses. The simple, sweet, pastoral, modal melody is harmonized by Delius with chromatic passing tones that at times give the impression of bitonality when set against the lower harmonic roots. The melody is built in cumulative phrases, until the oboe has learned the whole tune and now steps forward as a solo underscored by lovely strings. The clarinet then comes forward with an authentic "cuckoo" call. The middle section of the tune is developed as the "cuckoo" clarinet enters at several points. The strings create a small looping pattern just before the ending, and manifest some simple yet rich new harmonies. A major chord dies away to silence. The piece is based on the Norwegian folk song "In Ola Valley, in Ola Dale," and is, to some extent, a transcription of Edvard Grieg's own treatment of the piece in his Norwegian Folksongs for piano, Op. 66.

"Summer-night on the river" (1911), one of the few thoroughly impressionist pieces by this composer, opens with gently sighing winds, over a droning pedal point in the muted double basses, and sustained horn notes. The string section enters, their muted sound creating a rich yet somber timbre. There is the beginning of a sea-faring melody but it quickly transforms into undulating figures and trills that perfectly describe a flowing river. A solo cello sings out with a lyrical theme, which is taken over by a solo violin, soon joined by a solo viola, all surrounded by the flowing patterns. The solo violin melody becomes "softer and softer as if dying away in the distance." There is a mystical and atmospheric coda with trilling chromatics in the solo violin, supported by sustained and pizzicato strings. The river in question is the Loing, upon which the wildly blossoming garden of Delius' villa, in the French village of Grez, near Fontainebleau, faced; this distilled tone poem -- playing between six and seven minutes -- is the upshot of many meditative hours spent there.

[Article taken from All Music Guide]

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For those that can track it down, the February 2012 issue of Gramophone featured a great article on Delius:



It covers his early life and his travels from the U.S., England, Norway, Germany, and France. For a Gramophone article, it was pretty well-written unlike their Bartok article which was featured on the next issue.

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Eventyr (Once Upon A Time):

With the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Delius and his wife dithered over abandoning their home in the village of Grez, near Paris, before finally accepting Beecham's invitation to stay at either of his houses; Delius eschewed the London establishment for Watford. After an initial period of anxiety, he could confide in his publisher, Emil Hertzka (January 9, 1915) "...all goes well & I am working very much here as we are living in the country. In the next few months a good number of my works are to be performed here. I hope this terrible war will not last too long." In late February he was with Beecham at Manchester to hear Sea Drift, and on the 24th, the premiere of his Violin Sonata No. 1. The Piano Concerto and excerpts from A Village Romeo and Juliet figured on the program of the Hallé concerts in mid-March. Meanwhile, Delius settled down to work on his Requiem and An Arabesk, and made sketches for Eventyr. After a summer and fall sojourn in Norway, the Deliuses returned to Grez, though nothing more is heard of Eventyr until December 31, 1917, in a letter to his friend, conductor and composer Norman O'Neill, "For the last 16 days we have had arctic cold & cannot keep our house warm... -- I have just finished a new work 'Eventyr' after Asbørnsens [sic] fairy tales for Orchestra & have rather tired my eyes...." In fact, Delius was already in the grip of a syphilitic infection, contracted before the turn of the century, which by 1923 would leave him paralyzed and blind. There is no hint in Eventyr of the vicissitudes surrounding its composition, though -- as in those other works of Scandinavian inspiration, A Song of the High Hills and An Arabesk (both 1911) -- Delius' utterance has taken an astringently muscular turn. Peter Christen Asbjørnsen's collection of Norwegian folk tales and legends, published between 1842 and 1871, is the undisputed source for Eventyr (Once upon a time), but, as Felix Aprahamian noted, "It has been said that...Eventyr is not based on any particular story, but an attempt to convey in music something of the atmosphere of [the] tales. The music itself seems to disprove this, for, so vivid are its colours and contrasts, it hints at a programme as detailed as that of Strauss' Till Eulenspiegel." Eventyr is dedicated to Henry Wood, who conducted its premiere at Queen's Hall on January 11, 1919.

[Taken from All Music Guide]

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A Mass of Life:

Delius was an ardent Nietzschean; the text of this large work for chorus, soloists, and orchestra comes from that philosopher's Also sprach Zarathustra. Zarathustra embodies the concept of the superior man of the future, possessing the Will to say "Yes" to Life at its highest. This work is in no sense a Christian mass, for it uses none of the liturgical words of the mass. Rather, it uses Nietzsche's words to celebrate Life, and in its selection of words from various parts of the poem, gives an overview of the entire life of Zarathustra beginning with his address to the Will. It is powerful and sensual music, depicting many of the same images found in Richard Strauss' famous tone poem inspired by the same source. Dances, inner meditations, and pastorale scenes coexist with scenes of great mystery and of grandeur in this 100-minute piece. There is one textual issue concerning the words. Delius originally set the English translation of John Bernhoff. Even before the first full performance of the work conductor Thomas Beecham recognized that this translation was hopeless, and commissioned a new translation which he fit to Delius' music (presumably with the latter's consent). Since then it has become more fashionable to use Nietzsche's original German.

[Taken from All Music Guide]

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Florida Suite:

The Florida Suite is the stuff of legend. After a desultory school career and a rather wavering application to the family wool business, young Delius persuaded his father to stake him as master of a hundred-acre orange plantation along the St. Johns River, south of Jacksonville, Florida. Taking a Cunard liner from Liverpool, he arrived in late March 1884 and remained until September 1885. The impact of those months can hardly be overestimated, for it was here, in this lushly tropical setting, with its glowing spectrum of lurid natural splendors and preternatural quiet, that he recognized his vocation and took his first real steps toward it. When Delius took possession of Solano Grove, he had just turned 22. The critic, Cecil Gray, who knew the composer well in his later years, ascribed to this period "... that which is known to mystics as 'the state of illumination,' a kind of ecstatic revelation which may only last for a split second of time, but which he who has known it spends the rest of his life trying to recapture...I knew, too, the exact moment at which that experience must have occurred...and when I asked him if it were so and if I were right, he was surprised and admitted that I was. The occasion was one summer night, when he was sitting out on the verandah of his house in his orange grove...and the sound came to him from the near distance of the voices of the negroes in the plantation, singing in chorus. It is the rapture of this moment that Delius is perpetually seeking to communicate in all his most characteristic work."

It is highly unlikely that Delius ever turned a dime (or a shilling) cultivating oranges, and his father eventually capitulated to force majeure by allowing him a period of study at the Leipzig Conservatory (beginning in the fall of 1886). While his actual studies at the conservatory proved relatively uninspiring, they did bring him into contact with Edvard Grieg, whose music and friendship would serve to cement his desire to become a composer. Grieg's lyrical suites also offered a convenient, if temporary, model that allowed the young Delius to give expression to the richness of his Florida experience. The resulting Florida Suite, was composed over 1886-1887.

The work is in four broadly expansive movements. The first, "Daybreak-Dance," opens with a lyrically rippling, ever more animated, evocation which gives way to a dance, "La Calinda"; this dance is one of the most ravishing moments in Delius' oeuvre, and he would make use of it again in his opera, Koanga. The second, "By the River," is a melodically effusive, fluently ingratiating elegy with two strains, laid out in a simple ABA design. In "Sunset-Near the Plantation," another spate of rhapsodic tone-painting again gives way to a spirited dance. The fourth movement, "At Night," opens with a horn quartet suggesting at once muted fanfares and plantation slaves singing a spiritual from across the water; this eventually yields to an alternately blithe and impassioned love song.

Delius must at some time have been assiduous in his studies, for he has the orchestra well in hand in this, his first large work. For the price of a barrel of beer, he heard the Florida Suite once in early 1888, in the company of Grieg and Christian Sinding, given by a restaurant orchestra in Leipzig; after this performance, he revised two movements and laid the work aside. It remained for Sir Thomas Beecham to discover and give it a proper premiere in 1937, three years after Delius' death.

[Article taken from All Music Guide]

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A Village Romeo & Juliet:

Throughout his career, Delius was compelled by Wagnerian ambition to works on a large scale, while his peculiar gift lay in a concentrated utterance of musical stream-of-consciousness, moments of ineffable poetry in which form dissolves into a collage of sensuous orchestral oddments held together by sheer feeling. Such moments are strewn liberally throughout his works from beginning to end, though they become the work itself only after 1900. Delian magic attends, for instance, the opera Koanga (1895-97), Appalachia (1896), in which the variation form is more congenial to it than attempts to bend it to the demands of a Piano Concerto (1897) or the tendentious program of Life's Dance (1899). Paris -- The Song of a Great City (1899) is almost pure evocation, though its effectiveness is diffused by its length. All are on a large scale, as is A Village Romeo and Juliet (1900 -1901), though the latter is a pivotal work in which Delius achieves a harbinger of his sui generis manner.

As in the works of the 1890s, A Village Romeo and Juliet, based on a work by Gottfried Keller, evinces large stretches of dutifully adequate, sometimes abjectly formulaic, music which, although not lacking charm or personality, do not seem not quite all-of-a-piece, or wholly realized, as are those scenes -- or the orchestral meditations upon them -- which gripped the composer and for the sake of which the opera exists. That they succeed despite the stilted diction of Delius' libretto -- "...and then to die -- would not that be a wondrous fate?" -- is a telling confirmation of their power. The archetypal "black fiddler" of Keller's popular novella obviously held a deep fascination for Delius, as did the free-living, free-loving bohemians who attempt to entice the young lovers to join them. It must be said that the opera contains some of Delius' most mawkish music, too: the lovers' wedding dream, for example. Their eventual suicide by drowning, as they make love for the first and last time on a sinking barge, afforded Delius the opportunity to compose an urbane, poetic answer to the Liebestod -- perhaps the archetypal moment in operatic experience. But for all their attractiveness, these morceaux -- whether vignettes or, like the finale, rhapsodically extensive -- are marked by a certain broadness of conception which looks back to the manner of the 1890s. Delius' love-death, for instance, belongs to the world of Appalachia. In the frequently excerpted orchestral interlude known as Walk to the Paradise Garden, on the other hand, he distills the poetry of the drama in a spellbinding, incandescent span which stands out as pure Delius, prophetic of such sounding miracles as Summer Night on the River, Brigg Fair, Songs of Sunset, or the late Irmelin Prelude. If A Village Romeo looms as something of a mixed bag, Delius' mixture of the exquisite and the visionary justifies its periodic revival.

Delius composed A Village Romeo to his own English text which, with the help of his wife, he translated (with occasional gaffes) into German for its first performance at Berlin's Komische Oper, February 21, 1907, led by Fritz Cassirer.

[Taken from All Music Guide]

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Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner. Frederick Delius is my favorite composer of all-time. He has knocked Shostakovich down to second place. Delius is my musical soulmate. It took me four years to realize this, but no other composer has had this long-term hold on me. I go through different phases sure, no doubt, but I always return to Delius. For me, there's Delius and then there's the rest.

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What Delius does for me no other composer has ever done before: induce tears of sadness and of joy all in the same work. I'm comfortable in my manhood to admit this and I'm not ashamed at all. Why should I be? From this moment forward, I will be this board's Delius advocate or do I already share this privilege?

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Paris: The Song of a Great City -

Delius lived in Paris from 1880 almost up to the end of the century, and was an active member of the community of artists, musicians and writers living on the West Bank of the Seine. The work, described by his friend Philip Hestletine as "a corner of his own soul, a chapter of memories", was written at the composer's house in the French countryside. To remind himself of the moods the city Delius made rough notes on his first sketches -- "mysterious city ... city of pleasures ... of music and dancing". "Paris" is scored for large orchesta, used to opulent effect. The slow opening depicting dusk enfolding the city is followed by more urban sounds -- street cries and (perhaps to the puzzlement of todays Parisians!) the piping of a goat-herd. After dark the scene livens as night-life starts, quieter passages suggesting the whispered conversations of lovers. The music of cafes and music-halls is heard. As dawn breaks the voice of the city is gradually stilled. Much of Delius's music is pastoral in inspiration. Here he shows a more panoramic and representational approach to his subject. The first British performance was conducted in 1908 by Sir Thomas Beecham, who consistently championed Delius's music.

[Taken from All Music Guide]

[Leo K.]

Thanks for sharing those excellent articles John! And great to hear your continued thoughts on Delius, it's so awesome to hear how a composer's work can become connected to us personally.

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Thanks for sharing those excellent articles John! And great to hear your continued thoughts on Delius, it's so awesome to hear how a composer's work can become connected to us personally.

Yeah, I think Delius was a serious innovator and really pushed the envelope, but in a completely different way than a composer like Stravinsky for example. Like Debussy, Delius was a quiet revolutionary. His music defies categorization and the tag he's usually associated with "Impressionism" really doesn't do his music justice.

I look forward to your comments regarding that documentary. It's excellent. I watched it twice.

[Szykneij]

I decided to give an old Delius LP I bought used and never heard a spin, and discovered this magazine page inside. There's no date on the article, but the album is a 1971 recording. It may be of interest to the Delius fans here.

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I decided to give an old Delius LP I bought used and never heard a spin, and discovered this magazine page inside. There's no date on the article, but the album is a 1971 recording. It may be of interest to the Delius fans here.

Thanks for this, Szkneij. I'm hoping to make a trip to Jacksonville, FL. very soon and visit the Delius House. I'd also like take a stroll along the St. Johns River and just try to get a feeling of the sights and sounds Delius must have experienced there.

What recording is this LP of yours?

[Szykneij]

Thanks for this, Szkneij. I'm hoping to make a trip to Jacksonville, FL. very soon and visit the Delius House. I'd also like take a stroll along the St. Johns River and just try to get a feeling of the sights and sounds Delius must have experienced there.

What recording is this LP of yours?

Sir Thomas Beecham - Royal Philahrmonic - Music of Delius
Brigg Fair/ A Song Before Sunrise/ Marche-Caprice/ On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring/ Summer Night on the River/ Sleigh Ride (Winter Nacht)/ Intermezzo from "Fennimore and Gerda".

(My blizzard listening choice I mentioned in the Diner.)

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An interesting article that dismisses Delius with the usual tired rhetoric: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/classicalmusic/9383360/The-chromatic-slithering-of-Delius-leaves-me-cold.html

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Sir Thomas Beecham - Royal Philahrmonic - Music of Delius
Brigg Fair/ A Song Before Sunrise/ Marche-Caprice/ On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring/ Summer Night on the River/ Sleigh Ride (Winter Nacht)/ Intermezzo from "Fennimore and Gerda".

(My blizzard listening choice I mentioned in the Diner.)

Ah, excellent.

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-The Dance Rhapsodies-

A Dance Rhapsody (No. 1), for orchestra, RT vi/18:

Compositional maturity came for Delius at the turn of the century, and with it the ambition for large-scale utterance hand-in-hand with a pressing need to find formal designs capable of sustaining grandiose proportions. The operatic framework of A Village Romeo and Juliet -- composed over 1900-1901, his first fully characteristic work -- offered one solution. The quasi-dramatic Nietzsche settings of A Mass of Life offered another. Such orchestral works as the piano concerto or the tone poem Paris, are far less satisfactory due to the conflict of an unconventional imagination at war with conventional formal procedures. The adoption of a loose scheme of variations provides the scaffolding of his most successfully extensive works, beginning with the revised version of Appalachia (1898-1903), "variations on an old slave song," and, preeminently Brigg Fair. As Peter Warlock noted in his pioneering Frederick Delius, published in 1923, "The first Dance Rhapsody which dates from the same period as Brigg Fair is almost exactly similar in form. After a quiet prelude, the chief dance theme is announced by the oboe, and save for a middle section, which is yet pervaded by echoes of the main theme, the whole work consists of repetitions of this one melody with harmonic variations that are kaleidoscopic in their in their ever-changing tones and colours." Composed in 1908, for those colors Delius required a profligately large orchestra supplemented by unusual instruments. Thomas Beecham left a flamboyant account of the First Dance Rhapsody's premiere, conducted by the composer in the Hereford Shire Hall on September 8, 1909, as part of the Three Choirs Festival. Delius delegated a prominent part to the rarely encountered bass oboe, and for the occasion only a lady amateur could be found to play it. "Now the bass oboe...is to be endured only if manipulated with supreme cunning and control...a perfect breath control is the essential requisite for keeping it well in order, and this alone can obviate the eruption of sounds that would arouse attention even in a circus. As none of these safety-first precautions had been taken, the public...was confounded by the frequent audition of noises that resembled nothing so much as the painful endeavour of an anguished mother-duck to effect the speedy evacuation of an abnormally large-sized egg...." Pratfalls aside, Warlock put his finger on one source of Delian magic -- "...though the outward form of the work is of the crudest and simplest character, its spiritual curve, so to speak, is wholly satisfactory."

[Taken from All Music Guide]

I couldn't find any information on A Dance Rhapsody (No. 2), for orchestra, RT vi/22.

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Leo K., how is your Delius listening going? Have you listened to any of that outstanding Delius Collection yet? I've been digging out some of Handley's older recordings both on EMI (Classics for Pleasure releases) and Chandos and I've been enjoyed them thoroughly. His Florida Suite and North Country Sketches are some of the best on record I've heard. I think Handley was a good Delian in the respect that he had an ear for the form and shape of the music which give many conductors problems. It's trying to find the ongoing 'musical narrative' in Delius that remains a challenge.