Frederick Albert Theodore Delius CH (29 January 1862 – 10 June 1934) was an English composer born in Bradford in the West Riding of Yorkshire in the north of England.
Delius's parents were German. Julius and Elise Pauline Delius had moved from Bielefeld, Germany to England to set themselves up in the woolen business. Frederick ('Fritz' to his family, 'Fred' to his friends) Delius was the fourth of their fourteen children.
Although born in England and educated at Bradford Grammar School (where the singer John Coates was his contemporary), Frederick Delius felt little attraction for the country of his birth and spent most of his life abroad, in the United States and the continent of Europe, chiefly in France. Nonetheless his music has been described as 'extremely redolent of the soil of this country [i.e. Britain] and characteristic of the finer elements of the national spirit' by Felix Aprahamian.[1]
Although Frederick showed early musical promise, his father was very much set against a musical career and wanted Delius to work in the family business.
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Julius Delius eventually sent Frederick (apparently at Frederick's request) to be the manager of a grapefruit plantation at Solano Grove on the St Johns River in Florida. There, west of St Augustine and south of Jacksonville, Delius continued to be engrossed in music and in Jacksonville met Thomas Ward, who became his teacher in counterpoint and composition.
While in Florida, Delius had his first composition published, and later put his memories into the Florida Suite, written at Leipzig in 1887. The house he lived in from 1884–1885 in Solano Grove was given to Jacksonville University and moved on campus in 1961. The University holds the Delius Festival each year in honour of the composer. After he left Florida, Delius taught music in Danville, Virginia and eventually moved to New York.
After his stay in New York, his father finally agreed to allow him a musical education, and consented to send him to Leipzig to study at the conservatory. He was befriended there by Edvard Grieg, who encouraged him and became a lifelong friend.
In 1897 Delius met the German painter Jelka Rosen. They soon set up home in the French village of Grez-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau, and married in 1903. Apart from a short time, when the area was threatened by the advancing German army during the First World War, he lived in Grez for the rest of his life.
In 1907 he met Thomas Beecham, who was to be the greatest champion of his music during his lifetime in the English-speaking world. Until then Delius's audience was German, principally due to the conductors Fritz Cassirer and Hans Haym.
Delius's latter years were spent chiefly at the home he and his wife set up in Grez. These years were marred by increasing ill-health. As a young man (possibly in Paris) he had caught syphilis; the long term effects of which were to rob him of his sight and to cause him to become increasingly paralysed, eventually needing use of a wheelchair. He therefore employed Eric Fenby, who originally wrote Delius a fan letter, as his amanuensis and the great works of Delius's final years were dictated to Fenby, who later wrote a book about the experience of working with Delius.[2] Fenby also wrote the screen adaptation from the book for a film, Song of Summer, directed by Ken Russell, starring Max Adrian as the blind composer. [2]
Delius was profoundly engaged in the contemplation of nature and disliked religion, though Koanga displays an interest in voodooism. He admired the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, and his choice of Nietzsche texts for A Mass of Life, the determinism evident in Irmelin and the Village Romeo and Juliet, and the living metempsychosis of the boy and the seagull in Sea Drift have prompted some to see in his work a form of pantheism.
Delius died at Grez in 1934 and was buried in a nearby cemetery on the Marlotte road out of Grez. The interment ceremony was unusual as there was no priest present, and there were no prayers or music. In 1935, in completion of his own declared wish to be buried in 'a quiet country chuchyard in a south of England village', his remains were exhumed and taken from France to the UK. Jelka contracted pneumonia during the crossing, and could not attend the funeral. On 24 May an Anglican interment took place at the Church of Saint Peter in Limpsfield, Surrey. Vast crowds converged, and a section of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, together with the cellist Beatrice Harrison (of Oxted, nearby), who had given early performances of his works, performed after the ceremony, and Sir Thomas Beecham gave the address. After Jelka Delius died, four days later, she was interred beside her husband. Beecham's grave is about ten yards from theirs.
Delius's musical style is one of the most unusual in Western musical history. Characterized by a curious mixture of pentatonic figures and chromaticism, although still largely tonal, it reflects a move from the textbook post-romanticism of the years following the death of Richard Wagner (1883) to a style that was unique to Delius, blending Impressionism with the slightly older post-romanticism and northern European and African-American folk idioms. His use of luscious harmonies - mainly slow moving, and constantly evolving melody, with the frequent use of leitmotifs - is what prompted Sir Thomas Beecham to describe him as "the last great apostle of romantic beauty in music." His harmony and melody were influenced greatly by African-American music of the time, using blues harmony and melodic characteristics that would become distinctly jazz and blues 20 years later.
His best-known works include the brief orchestral piece On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring; Brigg Fair ('An English Rhapsody'); In A Summer Garden; North Country Sketches; A Mass of Life to Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra; Florida Suite; Sea Drift, a setting of text by Walt Whitman, for baritone, chorus and orchestra; A Late Lark, setting of text by William Ernest Henley; Songs of Farewell, another setting of Whitman texts, for chorus and orchestra; Cynara and Songs of Sunset, both settings of texts by Ernest Dowson; Koanga, which as an opera with a black principal character antedates George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess by four decades and is roughly contemporaneous with Scott Joplin's Treemonisha; an atheist Requiem; four concertos: a violin concerto, a cello concerto, a double concerto for violin and cello, and a piano concerto (also somewhat Gershwinesque); the colourful, picturesque tone poem Paris: Song of a Great City; and the beautifully exuberant symphonic composition Life's Dance. Orchestral excerpts from his operas, for example La Calinda from Koanga — which originated in the Florida Suite — and The Walk to the Paradise Garden from A Village Romeo and Juliet, are also played and recorded reasonably often. There are a number of chamber works (three mature violin sonatas, a cello sonata and a string quartet).
The difficulties which Delius experienced in obtaining adequate public performance of his works caused him (and those who admired his music) to recognise the necessity of making available good quality gramophone records, by which it should become more widely known. As in live performance, Thomas Beecham was the pioneer of this movement, although Geoffrey Toye (with London Symphony Orchestra) conducted a notable group of orchestral recordings for HMV around 1930 including Brigg Fair, In a Summer Garden (A Song before Sunrise conducted by John Barbirolli on the fourth side), On Hearing the First Cuckoo, and Summer Night on the River, which were admired by the composer, among others.[3] There are no very early recordings of the concerti, but by 1936[4] the Violin Sonata No. 1 was recorded by May Harrison with Arnold Bax (HMV), and No. 2 by Albert Sammons with Evlyn Howard-Jones (Columbia); the second is also in the viola arrangement by Lionel Tertis with George Reeves, in a set that also contains the "Entr'acte" and "Serenade" from the incidental music to James Elroy Flecker's Hassan.[5] Beatrice Harrison had recorded the Elegie and Caprice with a small orchestra under Fenby's direction. Howard-Jones also recorded several short keyboard works.
The first Sea Drift to be issued (though soon deleted) was Decca's in 1929 with Roy Henderson, conducted by Anthony Bernard (1891-1963) (though the conductor is not named on the label).[6] Decca was founded in 1929, and this was one of its earliest releases, a succès d'estime for the company's founder, Sir Edward Lewis. Thomas Beecham had made the first recording of the work a year previously, with baritone Dennis Noble, the London Symphony Orchestra and the Manchester Beecham Opera Chorus (Columbia), but poor acoustics caused it to remain unpublished. Beecham began his Delius recordings with the old Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, for Columbia, with the Walk to the Paradise Garden and the First Cuckoo, in December 1927, and Summer Night on the River (July 1928), but had two failed attempts at Brigg Fair in July and November 1928 before fully achieving his intentions in a December session. In 1929 he accompanied at the piano a series of Delius song recordings with Dora Labbette, only some of which were issued.
Delius Society recordings
In April 1934 Beecham recorded Paris: The Song of a Great City (with the London Philharmonic Orchestra), and as Fenby sat with the dying Delius they waited in vain for the test pressings to be released by the French Customs. Delius told Fenby he wanted Beecham to record all his best music.[7] Soon after Delius's death, Beecham persuaded Jelka (who knew that she was in failing health) that a Delius Trust should be created to make possible a model edition of his works and to provide for them to be recorded. To the latter purpose a Delius Society was formed, initially as a private organization, and at the request of Beecham and the Society Committee it was taken over in 1934 by Columbia Records,[8] for the issue of records outside the normal monthly listings, which could be obtained by members of the public who paid a subscription to the Society. Three volumes were issued before the war, all conducted by Beecham.[9]
Volume 1 (recorded 1934, issued 1934/5): Paris; Koanga, closing scene; Eventyr; Hassan, Interlude and Serenade; songs 'To the Queen of my Heart' and 'Love's Philosophy' (with Heddle Nash).
Volume 2 (recorded 1936): Sea Drift (with John Brownlee); Over the Hills and Far Away; In a Summer Garden; Intermezzo from Fennimore and Gerda.
Volume 3 (recorded 1938): Appalachia; Hassan, La Calinda, and closing scene (with Jan van der Gucht); the prelude from Irmelin. Several other titles recorded in 1938 remained unpublished.
After the war Beecham resumed the project, but now under the HMV label.[10] Four titles, including the Piano Concerto with Betty Humby Beecham, made in October 1945 remained unpublished, but a year later the concerto was successfully re-recorded, a fine version of the Violin Concerto with Jean Pougnet was made, and also First Cuckoo, Song of the High Hills, Brigg Fair, Marche Caprice and the Irmelin prelude. The Songs of Sunset with Nancy Evans and Redvers Llewellyn were recorded but not issued. However, May and July 1948 saw a complete Village Romeo and Juliet (12 discs). After a failed Sea Drift with Gordon Clinton in January 1951, there was a successful one with Bruce Boyce in April 1954. In January and April 1953, the celebrated recording of A Mass of Life (with Rosina Raisbeck, Monica Sinclair, Charles Craig and Bruce Boyce) was made.[11] A substantial recording of incidental music for Flecker's Hassan was made by Beecham for CBS Columbia in October 1955, and other Delius Trust recordings continued to appear on that label. He cut many other records of shorter works between 1946 and April 2 1957; meanwhile Sir Anthony Collins was recording some of these for Decca.[12] A powerful account of the violin concerto by Robert Gerle (conducted by Robert Zeller) was recorded by Westminster and issued by World Record Club (CM 59) about 1960; the work was again chosen, together with the Double Concerto, conducted by Meredith Davies and performed by Yehudi Menuhin with Paul Tortelier, for an EMI Quadrophonic release in 1977 (ASD 3343), produced in consultation with Eric Fenby. At about the same time the World Record Club (having become a branch of EMI) reissued the early Beecham Delius recordings in two box set volumes on its 'Retrospect' label, also under Fenby's supervision.
(in chronological order)