1862–1934 · United Kingdom · 20th century
Frederick Delius (1862–1934) was a British composer, born in Bradford, who spent most of his life in Grez-sur-Loing near Paris. He wrote operas, orchestral and choral works, and songs. The site offers players six of his pieces for voice and piano, at the Intermediate+ and Advanced levels.
Frederick Delius was born in Bradford, in northern England, on 29 January 1862. His family was well-off and in trade, with German roots. Of the four sons he was the second, and there were also ten daughters. His father, Julius Delius, came to England to make his living in the wool trade and took British nationality in 1850.
Music filled the Delius house. Guests who played for the family included Joseph Joachim and Carlo Alfredo Piatti. Though his roots were German, the boy preferred Chopin and Grieg to Mozart and Beethoven, and he kept that preference all his life. His first violin teacher was Rudolph Bauerkeller (Hallé Orchestra); for more advanced study he went to George Haddock of Leeds.
Delius played the violin well enough to give lessons in later years, but what he loved most was improvising at the piano. He attended Bradford Grammar School from 1874 to 1878, then the International College at Isleworth, near London, from 1878 to 1880. He was not a hard-working pupil, yet the college was close enough to town for concerts and the opera.
His father expected him to join the family business and spent about three years pressing him to do it. His first post was in Stroud, at the firm's local office, where business went tolerably well. In Chemnitz he let his duties slide, travelling instead to Germany's great musical centres and studying under Hans Sitt. Later he was sent to other countries, but there too he put art before trade, and in France he often slipped away to the Riviera. His father saw that the son would never make a businessman, yet still objected to music as a career, so Delius sailed to America to run the orange plantation that his father had purchased.
Delius spent the time from spring 1884 to autumn 1885 in Florida, at Solano Grove, a plantation on the St Johns River roughly 40 kilometres south of Jacksonville. Oranges hardly interested him, and he kept on with music. Jacksonville was where he got to know Thomas Ward, his future teacher of counterpoint and composition. Delius later remarked that Ward's lessons were the only ones that did him real good.
Florida also shaped his first sense of American music. In the hotels there, African-American waiters also worked as singers and gave a vocal concert every day, and this was how Delius first heard spirituals. Singing from steamers passing on the river also reached the veranda of his house. He later told Fenby that this singing was what first made him want to express himself through music.
His first published piece, a piano polka entitled Zum Carnival, came out in Florida. Towards the end of 1885 he put a caretaker in charge of the plantation and moved to Danville, Virginia. From then on his life was entirely musical. A notice in the local paper advertised lessons on the piano and violin and in theory and composition, and he taught French and German as well.
In 1886 his father finally agreed to a musical career for him and paid for his professional training. Delius left Danville and sailed home to Europe via New York, pausing there for a short time to teach a few pupils. At the Leipzig Conservatoire he spent a year and a half with Carl Reinecke and Salomon Jadassohn, and again with Hans Sitt.
Leipzig was an important musical centre; Arthur Nikisch and Gustav Mahler both conducted at the city's opera. In his piano work with Reinecke he advanced slowly, but Jadassohn remarked on his diligence and his understanding of counterpoint.
Meeting Edvard Grieg mattered far more. Grieg noticed the young composer's potential and had a considerable influence on his work. In 1888, in the spring, Sitt directed Delius's Florida Suite, and only three people were listening: Sinding, Grieg and Delius himself. Grieg and Sinding were thrilled and became keen backers. In April 1888, over dinner in London, Grieg finally won Julius Delius round to the view that his son belonged to music.
In 1888 Delius left Leipzig for Paris. His uncle Theodore looked after him there, with help both in daily life and in money. During the next eight years his friends included writers and painters, among them Paul Gauguin, Edvard Munch and August Strindberg. He had almost no contact with French musicians, though Florent Schmitt prepared the piano scores of Irmelin and The Magic Fountain, his first two operas. Because of this, France never got to know his music well.
Delius's Paris years were fruitful. He finished his first opera, Irmelin, in 1892; his second, The Magic Fountain, followed in 1895 and Koanga in 1897. In that same year Gunnar Heiberg asked him for music to accompany his play Folkeraadet. Prague accepted The Magic Fountain for production, but for reasons that remain unknown the project came to nothing.
A major change came with his meeting the German painter Jelka Rosen, who was to become his wife. She painted for a living, counted Auguste Rodin as a friend and regularly showed her work at the Salon des Indépendants. Their shared enthusiasm for the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and for Grieg's music drew them together. Jelka acquired a house in the village of Grez-sur-Loing, around 64 kilometres from Paris, on the fringe of Fontainebleau. Delius first came to see her there, and after a short trip to Florida he settled in her house.
They married in 1903 and, except for a short time during the First World War, stayed in Grez until his death. They had no children. At Grez Delius wrote much of his music: the orchestral Paris: The Song of a Great City (1899), the choral Appalachia, Sea Drift and A Mass of Life, and the operas A Village Romeo and Juliet and, in 1909–1910, his last, Fennimore and Gerda.
The first successes came to Delius in Germany. Alfred Hertz at Elberfeld, Julius Buths at Düsseldorf, Hans Haym and Fritz Cassirer became his steady supporters. Haym conducted, on 13 November 1897, Over the Hills and Far Away, a fantasy overture, under a German title; this is regarded as the earliest performance of his music on German soil. Hertz put on a concert of Delius's works in London in 1899, but his orchestral works then went unplayed in English concert halls until 1907.
Most of the premieres in those years took place in Germany. On 14 December 1901 Elberfeld heard the first performance of Paris. In 1904 Cassirer gave the premiere of Koanga, and in 1906 Sea Drift, to words by Walt Whitman, was first heard at Essen. A Village Romeo and Juliet had its first staging in Berlin in 1907. Until the First World War began, Delius's position in Germany remained secure.
Only from 1907, once Thomas Beecham had become its champion, did his music sound regularly in Britain. In January 1908 Paris reached British audiences for the first time under Beecham; in 1909 he directed the first performance of A Mass of Life in its entirety, and in 1910 he put on, at London's Covent Garden, A Village Romeo and Juliet. Around then Delius composed several of his most popular works: In a Summer Garden (1908), the 1912 piece On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, Brigg Fair (1907) and Summer Night on the River (1911).
When the First World War came, the Deliuses left Grez, afraid of a German occupation, and settled in the south of England. There he composed a Requiem (1914–1916), as well as several concertos and sonatas for various instruments. The Requiem commemorates young artists who fell in the war; it ignores the church liturgy and sings of nature's renewal. Albert Coates performed it in London in 1922, and some believers took offence at its atheism.
By the war's end Delius and Jelka were back in Grez. In the twenties he became seriously ill and remained paralysed and blind until his death. By 1922 he used two walking sticks; by 1928 total paralysis and blindness had set in. His Second Violin Sonata (1923) had to be written down by Jelka. Treatment was costly, blindness stopped him composing, and with no concerts on the Continent his fees dwindled. Beecham helped with money discreetly, while the patron of music Balfour Gardiner purchased the Grez house and let the Deliuses stay there free of charge.
Interest in his music in England nevertheless grew. The score he wrote for Hassan, a play by James Elroy Flecker (1923), succeeded both financially and artistically; the play was staged 281 times at His Majesty's Theatre in London. In 1929 Beecham organised, at the Queen's Hall in London, a Delius festival lasting six days; the composer attended in a wheelchair.
From 1928 a young English musician, Eric Fenby, stayed at Delius's side. Hearing that the composer was struggling to write by dictating to Jelka, he offered his help. Fenby took new works down from dictation and helped to revise earlier ones. This produced Cynara (Ernest Dowson), A Late Lark (W. E. Henley), a third violin sonata (1930), A Song of Summer and, in 1932, Idyll for soprano, baritone and orchestra. Among their joint works were also the Songs of Farewell, written for chorus and orchestra to poems by Whitman and dedicated to Jelka.
In 1932 Delius received the freedom of Bradford. In 1933 Edward Elgar, flying to Paris to conduct his Violin Concerto, came to see him at Grez. Delius did not much care for Elgar's music, but the pair hit it off and exchanged warm letters until Elgar died in February 1934.
Delius died in Grez-sur-Loing on 10 June 1934. He had hoped to be buried in his garden, but the French authorities did not permit this. He had another wish, in spite of being an atheist: a country churchyard in southern England, where people could lay wildflowers. Jelka was too ill to travel across the Channel, so he was laid temporarily in the village cemetery in Grez. The reburial took place on 26 May, beside St Peter's church in Limpsfield, Surrey. Jelka set off for England but fell ill on the journey, missed the ceremony and died on 28 May. She was laid in the same grave.
Delius's early works are lyrical: they carry the music he had come to know in America and the influence of Grieg and Wagner, and later of Debussy. Over the years he forged a style of his own, with distinctive orchestration and chromatic harmony. That style reached full maturity around 1907. In his mature works Delius moved ever further from familiar forms such as the sonata and the concerto. His music's popularity has been uneven, and it has often come under criticism. Even so, his followers founded a Delius society in 1962, which helps people learn about the composer's life and music.
Many influences shaped Delius. The first notable impressions, he said, came from plantation songs, and many early works recall the spirituals and folk music of the American South. At Leipzig he became a devoted follower of Wagner, learning how to build long stretches of unbroken music and taking over chromatic harmony. Grieg may have influenced him more than anyone: like Delius, he found his inspiration in nature and folk melody. Early on Delius drew on Chopin, and later on his contemporaries Ravel and Richard Strauss, while Percy Grainger first showed him the tune of Brigg Fair.
Delius wrote in many genres. His operas include Irmelin, The Magic Fountain, Koanga, A Village Romeo and Juliet and Fennimore and Gerda. For orchestra he composed Paris: The Song of a Great City, Brigg Fair and In a Summer Garden, and for chorus and orchestra Appalachia, Sea Drift and A Mass of Life. Among the major works of the war years is the Requiem. He also left a piano concerto, a concerto for two soloists, violin and cello, and violin sonatas. A Village Romeo and Juliet does without the usual acts and scenes; its tragic love story unfolds in a series of tableaux. A Mass of Life is the largest of his concert works, requiring four soloists, two choirs and a large orchestra. In Appalachia the voices are used like instruments, singing wordlessly, to recall the faraway plantation songs that had inspired the composer in Florida.
Delius's songs were also heard at the 1929 festival. The site gathers six of his pieces for voice and piano for players. At the Intermediate+ level are Il pleure dans mon cœur, To Daffodils and So White, so Soft, so Sweet is She. At the Advanced level are Le ciel est par-dessus le toit, It was a Lover and His Lass and Spring, the Sweet Spring. The easiest way in is to start with the three Intermediate+ pieces.