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Frederick Delius

by Jeffrey Dane © Jeffrey Dane 2001

His extended American episode in Florida formulated many of the personal and musical concepts on which he drew throughout his life.

Born in England, educated in Germany, befriended and endorsed by Norway's greatest composer Edvard Grieg, and living in France for much of his life, composer Frederick Delius (1862-1934) occupies an unusual place in the musical pantheon. Some consider him to be among the lesser of the great composers, while others see him as being among the greatest of the lesser composers. Both views have merit.

He also had a lengthy American stay, spending several years living and composing in what's now known as The Sunshine State. When Johannes Brahms, then Vienna's dominant musical figure, was composing his Fourth Symphony in Austria, Delius effectively neglected his orange plantation in Florida, to the consternation of his parents, and focused mainly on his own music. He enriched posterity with, among other things, the lushly beautiful and aptly named orchestral work, The Florida Suite.

His sojourn in Florida was a pivotal period. Here his ideas flourished and his perceptions were formulated. His experiences gave him many of the emotional and inspirational resources on which he drew later in life. Though most of his major works were written after his return to Europe, his American stay enabled him to draw heavily on these experiences, and had an effect on much of what he composed later on. In many respects he's indebted to Florida, as posterity is indebted to him for having left us works which outlived him and which will outlive us.

Jelka & Frederick Delius, with Australian pianist & composer Percy Grainger (standing).

The history of music is full of composers whose fathers opposed their sons' wishes to make music their lives' work. Handel, Berlioz, and Leonard Bernstein are among them, as is Delius. His merchant father didn't view music as a solvent profession but grudgingly allowed his son to study it. The young Delius often fled from business courses at the International College at Isleworth, England to attend opera and concert performances in London. He consented to his father's wishes to enter the family wool trade. Traveling to Norway and Paris on business, he formed ties which lasted throughout his life.

A turning point came in 1884 when he persuaded his father to let him operate an orange plantation in Florida. We can guess at the ulterior motive. Settling at Solano Grove near Jacksonville on the St. Johns River, he now had the freedom to devote himself seriously to music. His solitude amid the rich natural surroundings, and his interest in the plantation negroes' music, were decisive in his development, and even his later music contains echoes of these experiences. He thus anticipated by a decade the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak, whose American stay in the 1890s produced works, like the New World Symphony, influenced by American folksong. Even as late as the 1930s, half a century after the fact and not long after Delius' death, some people still living in the area where Delius lived, worked and taught remembered the charm of his improvisations and piano playing.

Delius' father agreed to support a period of musical study for his son at the Leipzig Conservatory, founded by the great Felix Mendelssohn. During his two years in Leipzig, Delius met Edvard Grieg, who encouraged the young man - and who convinced the elder Delius to allow his son further musical activity. A photograph of Nina & Edvard Grieg with Delius taken at a card party in Leipzig around 1887 records their rapport.

The young Delius (2nd from right) with Nina & Edvard Grieg (at left).

What Grieg did for Delius - quite helpful and beneficial in such circumstances of professional support - corresponds in large measure to a similar kindness extended to then-student composer Miklos Rozsa forty years later. His own teacher at the Leipzig Conservatory, Herman Grabner, wrote to Rozsa's father, a well-to-do industrialist, "If anyone has the right to be a composer, it is your son." Perhaps more than anything else, it was this professional conviction from Grabner that induced Rozsa pére to finally acquiesce to his son's wishes to abandon the study of chemistry and devote his life to music.

By 1888 Delius was living in Paris (where he met Maurice Ravel), and was moving in artistic circles that included his new friend, a painter named Paul Gaugin. In keeping with others of his area and era, Delius was a person of bohemian habits. Attractive to and attracted by the fair sex, at 34 he met a young painter, Jelka Rosen, whom he married in 1903. She later painted her husband with Gaugin's "Nevermore" in the portrait's background.

Delius soon returned to Florida briefly in the hope of leasing Solano Grove to a tobacco planter. Seeing the necessity for a peaceful European existence for his work, he and Jelka settled in a small village, Grez-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau outside Paris. Except for a brief flight to England warranted by World War I, France remained his home for the rest of his life.

It's been said prophets aren't appreciated in their own countries. It was a long time before Delius' music gained general acceptance in England. Several musicians promoted his work on the Continent, but in 1907 he met someone who became his finest interpreter and was instrumental in fostering his cause. No-one championed Delius' music more ardently than British conductor Sir Thomas Beecham (of the Beecham's Little Liver Pills fortune, popular in England for decades). Thanks to Beecham, Delius was for a time considered the equal of his countryman, Sir Edward Elgar (often referred to as "the English Brahms"), composer of the popular Pomp & Circumstance marches so often played at graduation ceremonies.

After the war, Delius developed progressive paralysis and blindness which specialists couldn't alleviate. His final years were difficult and riddled with physical misfortune but were highlighted by two occurrences. A Delius Festival given in England by Beecham in 1929 (thirteen years after the conductor had been knighted) brought the composer wide but belated renown, reminiscent of what Hector Berlioz said at a corresponding period in his own life sixty years before: "Yes, they're coming, but I'm going." Delius - blind, paralyzed, gaunt and emaciated in a wheelchair - attended the Festival on this, his last visit to England.

The other highlight of Delius' last years, and more significant for posterity, was the appearance of Eric Fenby. As Beethoven toward the end of his life had a devoted secretary and amenuensis in Anton Schindler, Delius now had the help of young Fenby. His devotion to Delius is a high-water mark in the annals of human thoughtfulness and dedication: he developed an intricate system of notating the music the disabled Delius dictated, being himself unable to see and write it down. Though incapacitated by physical debility, the composer's imagination and creativity were unaffected. "Fenby was indispensable in the creation of Delius' last compositions," wrote Raymond Ericson in The New York Times in 1982. He described the Delius-Fenby collaboration as ". . . one of the more affecting and heartwarming chapters in the history of music." (Bach also had to dictate his last works as he, too, was blind at the end of his life). Fenby related his experiences in "Delius As I Knew Him," published in 1936, and was an important figurehead in the Delius Society, founded long after the composer's death.

Delius at his home at Grez-sur-Loing, France.

It may be no accident that the last work Delius composed with Fenby's help was titled "Songs of Farewell," based on Leaves of Grass texts by Walt Whitman. Eric Fenby died in Scarborough, England at the age of 90 on February 18, 1997.

Delius' final years at Grez-sur-Loing were gladdened by visits from the celebrated, including Sir Edward Elgar, by then a musical icon in England. Delius heard his own music on radio and on records, but he remained secluded because of severe pain which he endured with great personal dignity and inner strength. On June 10, 1934, he died. French law forbade his being buried, as he wished, in his beloved garden, and he was interred in the cemetery at the Church of Saint Peter, on High Street, in Limpsfield, Surrey, England. His wife survived him by only a year, and they lie at rest together.

It might be more than mere coincidence that Sir Thomas Beecham, who wrote a biography of Delius ca. 1958, is buried not only in the same cemetery as the composer, but their graves are in very close proximity. Also at rest there is the cellist Beatrice Harrison, a close family friend of Delius. To her he had dedicated his "Caprice and Elegy," and his "Double Cello Concerto" had been written for her and her sister, May.

One need only consider the titles of Delius' works to see pastoral influences, suggestions of the American south generally, and of Florida in particular: "Appalachia" (1902), "The Walk To The Paradise Garden" (1907), "In A Summer Garden" (1908), "Summer Night On The River" (1912), "On Hearing The First Cuckoo In Spring" (1912), "Songs of Sunset," "A Late Lark," the opera "Koanga," a tragic story of the deep south, and the piece which by definition virtually symbolizes his American sojourn, "The Florida Suite" (1888). Clearly these pieces were products of Delius' own personal impressions, which drew from him some of the most personal music he ever wrote.

Delius' melodies are rarely complex and have a poignancy which typifies him. Even his most mature work suggests the romance of his formative years and contains echoes of them. It's said he matured personally and musically only when he realized the impossibility of recapturing youth, and his artistic vision flowered soon after his Florida stay. Conjecture has always been fruitless but it's still fascinating.