Frederick Delius

British composer

• Born: January 29, 1862
• Birthplace: Bradford, Yorkshire, England
• Died: June 10, 1934
• Place of death: Grez-sur-Loing, France

The richness and variety of Delius’s harmonic resources are principally displayed in works written for chorus and orchestra. His music evokes the expressiveness of lyric poetry and yet simultaneously challenges the conventions that usually convey such lyricism.

Early Life

Frederick Delius (DEE-lee-uhs) was born in Bradford, England, a bustling Yorkshire town where his parents, originally from Bielefeld, Germany, had established a profitable wool trade with expanding interests. Frederick was a sickly child who showed musical talent, but his father, although appreciative of music, envisioned only a mercantile career for his three sons. Delius’s mother, née Elise Pauline Krönig, supported her husband’s decisions, and later, when Delius achieved international renown, she obstinately refused to admit that he had any talent and never asked to hear a note of his music.

As a youth, Delius was sufficiently resilient to endure such a repressive and provincial environment. He quickly acquired proficiency on the violin but often spent hours at the piano indulging in a species of improvisation. In this way he was able to explore harmonic potentialities not found in traditional compositions. Throughout his life, for unknown reasons, he was reluctant to listen to music written before the nineteenth century, whereas Frédéric Chopin and Richard Wagner were lifelong influences.

Delius was enrolled at International College, Isleworth, from 1878 to 1880. While there, he visited London often to attend events of musical interest. He then entered the family business and traveled extensively as a sales representative. France and Norway made indelible impressions on him and exacerbated his desire to escape from the drudgery of the business world. In 1884, he went with Charles Douglas to Solano, Florida, to manage an orange plantation. Delius was delighted with the exotic surroundings, and he took particular interest in folk songs sung by local black performers. Twenty years later, while touring Norway, he heard similar melodies based on related intervals, but he noted that the harmonies were different. Delius’s observation is consistent with the view that there is a universality in all folk music. Many of his songs derive from folk tunes, although, because he endowed them with original idioms, they transcend their ethnocentrism. Composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, who was influenced by Delius, produced a similar effect in his music.

The Florida enterprise collapsed, but not before Delius had the fortunate opportunity to study for six months with Thomas F. Ward, a wayward Brooklyn organist. In August, 1885, Delius moved to Danville, Virginia, to teach music and languages privately, and in 1886, he worked briefly as an organist in were chosen before returning to Bradford. He had abandoned any thought of a business career, and his parents grudgingly paid for his admission to the Leipzig Conservatorium, where he came under the influence of Edvard Grieg, the eminent Norwegian composer. After eighteen months of course work, Delius had completed the requirements for a diploma, which he eventually received; more important, his first composition, Florida, was performed. After a trip to Norway in the company of Grieg, Delius settled in Paris, where, despite financial distress, he devoted his time to creative endeavors.

Life’s Work

Success and recognition came slowly. Even though Delius’s first published work, Légende (for violin and orchestra), appeared in 1892, performances of his work were sporadic until 1904, when his music found a receptive public in Germany, owing to the enthusiasm of musicians and friends who were impressed by his talent. Three of his six operas and several of his choral and orchestral works were first performed in Germany. Because of the persuasive advocacy of Sir Thomas Beecham Delius’s finest interpreter the London public was eventually exposed to the unorthodox, yet haunting and elegiac, music of this prodigal son of England.

The Paris years (1890-1897) were marked by an incipient bohemian flavor that gave way to a detached aestheticism. Delius made the acquaintances of Paul Gauguin, the French painter, August Strindberg, the Swedish dramatist, and Maurice Ravel, the French pianist and composer who wrote a piano and vocal score for Delius’s fifth opera, Margot la rouge, in 1902. It was also at this time that he met Jelka Rosen, a Scandinavian artist who became his wife in 1903. In May, 1897, she bought, with her mother’s help, a house in Grezsur-Loing, forty miles from Paris near Fontainebleau, where Delius composed the series of masterful works that guaranteed his lasting reputation.

Prior to his association with Jelka, Delius concentrated on an ambitious song cycle with adaptations of twelve poems from the Norwegian (dedicated to Grieg’s wife, Nina), five by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, three by Percy Bysshe Shelley, three by Paul Verlaine (in French), seven from the Danish (in English), and four from Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1883 Also Sprach Zarathustra (in German). Despite the different nuances of the various languages, these songs are similar in that the lavish harmonies embellish forced or inefficient melodies. The exotic chords underlining the melody are not schematic, however, and thus respond freely to the poetic idea. This creates a rhapsodic effect in which the voice parts often seem perfunctory. Grieg praised the inventiveness of these songs but did not find the handling of the voice appealing. It is evident from his choice of subjects that Delius was disdainful of any kind of lyrical pretension: He valued clarity and simplicity, and often mentioned the importance of a sense of flow. Through allusion, understatement, and falling cadences, these songs convey the magic of an evanescent world.

Between 1890 and 1900, Delius composed four operas, of which the first three are rarely performed. Taken as a whole, they demonstrate a compelling lyrical style graced by elegance of form. The Wagnerian principles of continuous melodic line and thematic development are evident, as are some overtly melodramatic effects. There are touches of inspiration, particularly in the emotional quality of the orchestral sonorities. In these operas, he began to eliminate contrapuntal and rhythmic factors to create a still atmosphere receptive to the fine-grained expressiveness of the voice parts. Like his last opera, Fennimore and Gerda (1908-1910), based on a novel by Danish author Jens Peter Jacobsen, these works lend themselves rather well to modern studio effects and to cinematic innovations. Many performances have been enhanced by films and slide projections.

A Village Romeo and Juliet (1900-1901) is more of a symphonic poem than an opera and can be favorably compared to Paris: The Song of a Great City (1899), a nocturne for orchestra that dates from the same period. The opera is written with subdued strokes, and, as in many of Delius’s compositions, there are no climaxes or dramatic thrusts. Assisted by his wife, he adapted a tale of Gottfried Keller, Die Leute von Seldwyla (1856-1874), to create the libretto. This is a work in which the action elucidates the music; it is an attempt to use words and gestures to convey what the music implies. Having achieved these objectives, at least in experimental form, Delius entered the decade that would see the ripest expressions of his talent and individuality as he produced his most creative and enduring works: Sea Drift (1903), a cantata from the poetry of Walt Whitman; A Mass of Life (1904-1905), based on Nietzsche’s “Nightsong of Zarathustra”; Songs of Sunset (1906-1907), for chorus and orchestra; Brigg Fair (1907), a rhapsody for orchestra; A Song of the High Hills (1911), for chorus and orchestra; and On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring (1912) and Summer Night on the River , tone poems for orchestra (1911).

The choral writing in these pieces, particularly the opening and closing sections, is solemn yet uplifting, and the more contemplative parts bear witness to Delius’s exceptional ability to convey a genuine sense of sublimity through purely tonal effects and complex chord patterns that leave the listener suspended in an ethereal vision. These pieces, like North Country Sketches (1913-1914) and Eventyr (1917), with which they share affinities, owe their strength not only to the exquisite sensibility that informs them but also to the architectural firmness that binds them.

Delius visited London in 1907 for the English premiere of Appalachia (1902), an orchestral piece with variations and a choral finale. At this time, he introduced to his colleagues the idea for a music society that would sponsor concerts and train musicians through subscriptions and donations. Soon after the proposal was made, the League of Music was founded, with Edward Elgar as president and Delius as vice president. The society struggled through two years of inconclusive activity and then collapsed. Neither composer had the time or inclination to impose administrative controls, but one positive outcome was the impression in the public eye that England was in the middle of a musical renaissance and that Delius was partly responsible for its inspiration.

As his music was slowly assimilated into the English repertoire, Delius began to experience physical disintegration accompanied by blindness and paralysis the result of a syphilitic infection contracted early in life. Nevertheless, he was still eager to compose, and he engaged the services of Eric Fenby, an English musician, who made recommendations as Delius dictated. In 1929, Thomas Beecham organized a Delius festival in London, the composer’s last public appearance. In the same year Delius was awarded the Companion of Honour by King George V, and he received an honorary degree from Oxford. Delius stoically bore his afflictions with serenity. He died at home on June 10, 1934, and was buried at Limpsfield, in Surrey.

Significance

Delius is a solitary figure in the landscape of twentieth century music. Like his friends Edvard Munch, the Norwegian painter, Igor Stravinsky, the Russian composer, and Henry Clews, Jr., the American sculptor, Delius had an iconoclastic strain in his temperament; he often expressed the opinion that the imaginative artist was the last holdout against an increasingly materialistic and dehumanized world. His music is rarely approachable in terms of classical tonality, and he stands apart from the main currents of musical influence. With respect to harmony and form, his methods are as fully advanced as any of his contemporaries. In addition, the melodic construction does not follow the conventional tensions and resolutions of nineteenth century practice and yields an impressionistic effect, seemingly the result of experimentation at the piano with voluptuous, chromatic chords.

The scores of Delius’s compositions rarely provided adequate phrasings and markings regarding tempo and expression. This problem is compounded by the fact that Delius circulated manuscripts that had not been redone by a professional copyist. For this reason, interpretations of his music require diligence and sensitivity on the part of the conductor to capture the nuances Delius so carefully inscribed. If not, the music appears indulgent, listless, bland, or incomprehensible, to use the vocabulary of his detractors. Philip Heseltine, who collaborated with Delius, reworked parts of the String Quartet, no. 2 (1916-1917) as well as two sonatas from the same period, and musicians who presented the premieres of Delius’s concertos made similar adjustments during rehearsals. Grieg emphasized that Delius should attend rehearsals as often as possible to remove vocal angularities or other inequalities in workmanship.

These irregularities may indeed stem from Delius’s character. His public persona suggests a dignified, aloof, intellectual aristocrat; privately he was affable and unreserved. Much of his music fluctuates between austerity and sheer opulence of sound. Some of his most bewitching innovations are found in the incidental music to James Elroy Flecker’s play Hassan: Or, The Golden Journey to Samarkand (1922), which was popular in London during the 1920’s. The spirited melodies and striking orchestral effects suggest that the fantastic nature of the play was sufficient in itself to stimulate Delius’s imagination. There is a nostalgic quality to Delius’s music, perhaps rooted in his sense of alienation, that adds a psychological dimension to the pictorial element and that enriches its subtle and elusive beauty.

Bibliography

Beecham, Thomas. Frederick Delius. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961. The definitive biography, with insights that only a conductor of Beecham’s stature could provide. Pompous but amazingly well-balanced, despite the author’s overwhelming bias in favor of the composer’s gifts. Unfortunately lacking in notes and bibliography.

Carley, Lionel, and Robert Threlfall. Delius. New York: Universe, 1984. The culmination of years of research and writing about Delius.

Chop, Max. The Collected Writings of the German Musicologist Max Chop on the Composer Frederick Delius. Compiled and translated by Phillip Jones. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002. Chop, a musicologist based in Berlin, wrote a study of Delius’s music, which is included here in English translation. The book also contains a biographical dictionary defining the people and organizations to which the study refers, other essays that Chop wrote about Delius (in both German and English), and some of the correspondence between them.

Delius, Clare. Frederick Delius: Memories of My Brother. London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1935. A sentimental account of Delius’s youth in Bradford among his eleven siblings and sometimes tyrannical father.

Fenby, Eric. Delius as I Knew Him. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1936. Reprint. New York: Icon Books, 1966. A poignant memorial to Delius’s courage and productivity in the years before his death (1928-1933). Fenby, who conducted many of Delius’s works, reveals his intimate knowledge of Delius’s habits and preoccupations.

Gustav, Gloria. The Road to Samarkand: Frederick Delius and His Music. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969. Effusive and energetic. Gustav sees Delius as a prophet unrecognized in his homeland until the popularity of Flecker’s play, first produced in September, 1923, secured his reputation.

Hutchings, Arthur. Delius: A Critical Biography. London: Macmillan, 1948. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977. Examines Delius’s literary sources and polyglot lyrics. A tightly knit, scholarly critique, but sometimes diffident. Hutchings makes too much of Delius’s pantheism and his affinity for Wagner and Nietzsche.

Jefferson, Alan. Delius. New York: Octagon Books, 1972. Written for the Makers of Modern Culture series, Jefferson’s book connects Delius with modernist trends in twentieth century music, art, and literature.

Jenkins, Lyndon. While Spring and Summer Sang: Thomas Beecham and the Music of Frederick Delius. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2005. Describes the relationship between Delius and conductor Beecham, who conducted Delius’s music, unearthed early pieces, and arranged and recorded still others.

Palmer, Christopher. Delius: Portrait of a Cosmopolitan. London: Holmes and Meier, 1976. Demonstrates Delius’s involvement in the arts and with artists in general. Contradicting the received image of Delius as a recluse, Palmer persuasively argues that Delius was susceptible to diverse influences.