Frederick Delius

[5][n 3] From 1874 to 1878 he was educated at Bradford Grammar School, where the singer John Coates was his slightly older contemporary;[7] Delius then attended the International College at Isleworth (just west of London) between 1878 and 1880.

[8] After this, Julius Delius recognised that there was no prospect that his son would succeed in the family business, but he remained opposed to music as a profession, and instead sent him to America to manage an orange plantation.

Randel notes that in local hotels, the African-American waiters doubled as singers, with daily vocal concerts for patrons and passers-by, giving Delius his introduction to spirituals.

[13] Upon Delius's return to Florida some years later to sell the plantation, it was suggested that Chloe, fearing that he had come to take her son away from her, fled with the child and disappeared.

Leipzig was a major musical centre, where Arthur Nikisch and Gustav Mahler were conductors at the Opera House, and Brahms and Tchaikovsky conducted their works at the Gewandhaus.

[2] In the same year, Delius began a fruitful association with German supporters of his music, the conductors Hans Haym, Fritz Cassirer and Alfred Hertz at Elberfeld, and Julius Buths at Düsseldorf.

It provoked some critical comment from the local newspaper, which complained that the composer put his listeners on a bus and shuttled them from one Parisian night-spot to another, "but he does not let us hear the tuneful gypsy melodies in the boulevard cafés, always just cymbals and tambourine and mostly from two cabarets at the same time at that".

[29] In 1909, Beecham conducted the first complete performance of A Mass of Life, the largest and most ambitious of Delius's concert works, written for four soloists, a double choir, and a large orchestra.

There was no return to the prosperity of pre-war years: Delius's medical treatment was an additional expense, his blindness prevented him from composing, and his royalties were curtailed by the lack of continental performances of his music.

Beecham gave discreet financial help, and the composer and musical benefactor H. Balfour Gardiner bought the house at Grez and allowed Delius and Jelka to live there rent-free.

[35][39] The festival included chamber music and songs, an excerpt from A Village Romeo and Juliet, the Piano and Violin Concertos, and premières of Cynara and A Late Lark, concluding with A Mass of Life.

[2] Other works produced in this period include a Caprice and Elegy for cello and orchestra written for the distinguished British cellist Beatrice Harrison, and a short orchestral piece, Fantastic Dance, which Delius dedicated to Fenby.

The pair followed the 1930 Test series between England and Australia with great interest, and regaled a bemused Jelka with accounts of their boyhood exploits in the game.

[54] Delius's familiarity with "black" music possibly predates his American adventures; during the 1870s a popular singing group, the Fisk Jubilee Singers from Nashville, Tennessee, toured Britain and Europe, giving several well-received concerts in Bradford.

[57] The music writer Anthony Payne observes that Grieg's "airy texture and non-developing use of chromaticism showed [Delius] how to lighten the Wagnerian load".

[61] Debussy, in a review of Delius's Two Danish Songs for soprano and orchestra given in a concert on 16 March 1901, wrote: "They are very sweet, very pale – music to soothe convalescents in well-to-do neighbourhoods".

[68] The Florida Suite (1887, revised 1889) is "an expertly crafted synthesis of Grieg and Negroid Americana",[69] while Delius's first opera Irmelin (1890–1892) lacks any identifiably Delian passages.

The first noticeable stylistic advance is evident in Koanga (1895–1897), with richer chords and faster harmonic rhythms; here we find Delius "feeling his way towards the vein that he was soon to tap so surely".

The first of these works was A Village Romeo and Juliet, a music drama which departs from the normal operatic structure of acts and scenes and tells its story of tragic love in a series of tableaux.

The entr'acte known as "The Walk to the Paradise Garden" is described by Heseltine as showing "all the tragic beauty of mortality ... concentrated and poured forth in music of overwhelming, almost intolerable poignancy".

[63] Although Payne argues that Appalachia shows only a limited advance in technique, Fenby identifies one orchestral passage as the first expression of Delius's idea of "the transitoriness of all mortal things mirrored in nature".

[63] Fenby describes A Mass of Life as standing outside the general progression of Delius's work, "a vast parenthesis", unlike anything else he wrote, but nevertheless an essential ingredient in his development.

[71] Brigg Fair (1907) announced the composer's full stylistic maturity, the first of the pieces for orchestra that confirm Delius's status as a musical poet, with the influences of Wagner and Grieg almost entirely absent.

[75] During this period Delius did not confine himself to purely orchestral works; he produced his final opera, Fennimore and Gerda (1908–1910), like A Village Romeo and Juliet written in tableau form, but in his mature style.

Of these pieces Payne highlights two: the Violin Concerto (1916), as an example of how, writing in unfamiliar genres, Delius remained stylistically true to himself; and the Cello Sonata of 1917, which, lacking the familiarity of an orchestral palate, becomes a melodic triumph.

[83] Beecham, however, records that despite this "fair show of acclaim", for all the impetus it gave to future performances of Delius's work the event might never have happened; none of the music was heard again in England for many years.

In a retrospective comment on the festival The Times critic wrote of full houses and an apparent enthusiasm for "music which hitherto has enjoyed no exceptional vogue", but wondered whether this new acceptance was based on a solid foundation.

These occasions were in the face of a general indifference to the music;[90] writing in the centenary year, the musicologist Deryck Cooke opined that at that time, "to declare oneself a confirmed Delian is hardly less self-defamatory than to admit to being an addict of cocaine and marihuana".

[109] The first recordings of Delius's works, in 1927, were conducted by Beecham for the Columbia label: the "Walk to the Paradise Garden" interlude from A Village Romeo and Juliet, and On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, performed by the orchestra of the Royal Philharmonic Society.

[112] By the end of the 1930s Beecham had issued versions for Columbia of most of the main orchestral and choral works, together with several songs in which he accompanied the soprano Dora Labbette on the piano.