DELIUS

FREDERICK DELIUS

(1862–1934)

London Philharmonic Orchestra – Nocturne, Paris: The Song of a Great City

Congress Theatre, Eastbourne, 1997

The music of Frederick Delius is unlike that of any other composer. While much of his work sounds quintessentially English in its lyricism and sense of nostalgia, the unconventional route he took to establishing his own style blended such diverse influences as the Negro spiritual, Wagner and the Scandinavian masters.

Born in Bradford of Prussian stock, Delius left England at the age of 21 to escape his father’s wool business and never returned to his homeland except for a few brief visits. He sojourned in Florida on an orange plantation, studied desultorily in Leipzig, where he met and was influenced by Grieg, then spent the remaining forty-six years of his life in seclusion at Grez-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau, forty miles southeast of Paris.

During his lifetime his music would have remained as neglected in England as it was in his adoptive country had it not been for the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, who cast himself in the role of its tireless champion. But an even greater service was performed for the composer by a young musician from Scarborough named Eric Fenby. By the mid-1920s, though he was still mentally alert, syphilis had rendered Delius blind and paralysed, and for the last six years of his life Fenby lived in Delius’s household, acting as his amanuensis and taking down new works from dictation while helping him complete or revise others.

Delius was a proud and hard man, impatient with conventional modes of thought, and similarly unorthodox in his harmonies and musical structures. His most characteristic work is drenched in subjective feeling, and often demands enormous orchestral forces. Some miniatures like Brigg Fair and Appalachia are based on folk songs while others, like the ‘Walk to the Paradise Garden’, an interlude from his opera A Village Romeo and Juliet, are simply and rapturously beautiful. While his reluctance to further the development of the forms he worked in has disaffected some critics, many others have been totally won over by the sheer beauty of his melodic lines and the atmosphere he can so subtly create. His larger choral works, like Sea Drift and A Mass of Life, seem to derive from a deep spirituality.

In Song of a Great City the city in question is Paris, where Delius spent some time as a young man. The piece dates from 1899 and had its first performance in Elberfeld, Germany two years later. Delius called many of his works ‘songs’, though this one, like the equally evocative Song Before Sunrise, is a purely orchestral piece.

Delius died in France in 1934 but was eventually reinterred in Limpsfield, Surrey. His widow, the artist Jelka Rosen, died of pneumonia just two days after accompanying his body on its final journey home, and was laid to rest beside him.