Bernard Hélène Joseph van Dieren (27 December 1887 – 24 April 1936) was a Dutch composer, critic, author, and writer on music, much of whose working life was spent in England.

They also relied on financial support from a group of admirers and friends, which included notable personalities such as Jacob Epstein, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, Augustus John, Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, Philip Heseltine (the composer Peter Warlock) and Cecil Gray.

Eric Coates, who played viola in the under-rehearsed premiere of Diaphony (1916), witnessed the contempt of the musical establishment - Parry, Stanford and others - towards van Dieren.

Constant Lambert, who conducted the first public performance of the Chinese Symphony from BBC Broadcasting House on 15 March 1935,[14] claimed that the theme for the opening movement, "Palindromic Prelude", from his 1938 ballet Horoscope, was dictated from beyond the grave by van Dieren.

[15] The music of van Dieren is harmonically chromatic, rhythmically fluid and freely polyphonic, tonally anarchic rather than atonal [16] and often notated without barlines.

[20][21] He set some German texts (particularly Heine), but mostly chose from the English Romantic poets, including Shelley, Byron, Keats, Beddoes and Walter Savage Landor.

Many of these pieces were premiered by the composer's wife Frida, but they have also been performed over the years by Kathleen Long, Robert Collet (1905-1993) Erik Chisholm, Ronald Stevenson, Eiluned Davies and (most recently) Christopher Guild.

[25] The Chinese Symphony (1912–14) [26] shows the characteristic style of the songs and chamber work could be applied to large forces: it is scored for five soloists, chorus and orchestra.

The text uses German translations by Hans Bethge of Chinese poetry, also used by Mahler in Das Lied von der Erde a few years earlier.

Along with Schoenberg and Busoni, the rhapsodic and lyrical style of Delius can often be heard in the Chinese Symphony and other orchestral works, such as the Elegy for cello and orchestra.