Delius: String Quartet (1916/17)
With Animation
Quick and lightly
“Late Swallows”. Slow and wistfully
Very quick and vigorously
Fritz Delius (changed to Frederick around the time of his marriage in 1903) was born on 29 Jan 1862 in Bradford. If the celebrating of a composer’s anniversary has any real lasting value, it is surely through the opportunity for re-appraisal: it has become too easy to view Delius as an archetypal representative of the early 20th cent. English tradition, with its associated “pastoral cow-pat” baggage. In the first instance, he was English only by birth: the second son of German parents, who had come to Yorkshire to fill their pockets via the thriving wool trade, he lived here only until the age of 22, thereafter residing in Florida, Leipzig, Paris, interspersed with various sojourns in Scandinavia, and finally settling in the village of Grez-sur-Loing, near the forest of Fontainebleau. It is also time to counterbalance the popular image of the blind, paralysed, irascible composer as portrayed in Ken Russell’s wonderful 1968 TV film “A Song of Summer” – accurate though that may be, based as it is on Eric Fenby’s deeply moving memoir of life as amanuensis to the composer during his harrowing final years. So we must no longer neglect those many more years when he was fit, energetic, and physically active. Alan Jefferson refers to “the lusty Bohemian; the witty and elegant adventurer; the bon viveur; the practical joker and raconteur; the man who, in his prime, was so handsome that he was greatly sought after by women” (thus underlining the lifestyle by which he contracted his killer disease – tertiary syphilis – in the first place, more than three decades earlier…..).
It was Grieg who persuaded Julius Delius that his son could be a musician, the two composers having met when Fritz was on a walking holiday with student friends in Norway. His was perhaps the greatest single influence on Delius’s own musical thinking: “….I tell you frankly, never in my life have I met a nature which has won all my love as yours has”. Ultimately, the two musicians who became Delius’s dearest friends (outside the extraordinary relationship with Eric Fenby) were the young composers Percy Grainger and Philip Heseltine (alias Peter Warlock). No amount of space in a concert programme can do justice to the part they each played in the Delius household, and readers are enthusiastically referred to the second volume of Lionel Carley’s priceless DELIUS A Life in Letters, where one can discover for oneself the depth of the bond he felt with each of them.
Delius has been central to my own life ever since the age of four or five, when my Dad first played me his old 78rpm Beecham records of Sea Drift. However, that early musical passion could only ever have the one practical outlet in adulthood, since by the time I graduated from Cambridge I found myself a professional string quartet player! At least I have occasionally had the opportunity to perform some of the smaller orchestral works, as a (very much part time) conductor – including a programme with the Academy of St Olaves in York in January 2012, which celebrated his big birthday with the help of many of his composer friends and acquaintances – notably those listed above (plus Sibelius).
The Fitzwilliam first tackled the String Quartet in the late 1970s: we were on a mission to record a series of “neglected masterworks” for Decca, and it didn’t take a lot of persuading on my part for colleagues to agree that this was a piece that demanded inclusion. As devotees of great string playing from earlier generations we were naturally drawn to the performances of Albert Sammons; and although at that time we never claimed any great expertise in English quartet music the Delius did seem to suit our playing style and sound – no doubt because of his very UN-Englishness, in so many aspects. Since many of those quartets we were working on were their respective composers’ sole contribution to our repertoire it seemed a pre-requisite to immerse ourselves in Sibelius symphonies and tone poems, operas by Borodin, Tchaikovsky, Janáček and Verdi, late Franck organ music and Fauré songs – in order to feel at home in each idiom. Whilst Delius was no exception, the elusiveness of his music in performance also necessitated a study of his greatest interpreters – and of course it was Sir Thomas Beecham himself we learnt most from:- tempo – particularly with regard to ebb and flow; meticulous phrasing and melodic direction; “orchestration”– as with so many composers who thought mainly via a larger canvas, it won’t do just to settle for an all-purpose string quartet sound; above all, perhaps, an identity with Delius’s extraordinarily personal harmonic language, together with an understanding of how to balance and weight every chordal progression. We can see from Beecham’s own scores that, although his performances seemed so spontaneously imaginative, this was not achieved without hours of painstakingly careful thought and preparation (assisted by their famous blue pencil markings!).
It so happens that the String Quartet is a particularly challenging piece to bring off the page, and be made to “work”: partly due to the constraints of the medium itself, where the performers must create their own palette of instrumental colour; but also because – especially in the outer movements – the formal structure is by no means obvious. Indeed, it would be too easy to dismiss the quartet simply because it won’t fit into conventional sonata forms. Readers know very well how Delius was blessed with his own intuitive feeling for natural shape and formal balance, based principally on emotional inspiration and an instinctive sense of flow. But we in the FSQ had to work hard at it! It took many months of study, allied to regular performance experience, before the process began to feel collectively “natural”. And with the passing of years, and a long break from the piece (due to the loss of two players) it has been hugely rewarding to find that the hard work of the 70s/80s has survived, and been resumed so effortlessly by our younger members over the past few years. They have also benefited indirectly from the invaluable advice, encouragement, and wisdom gained from playing to Eric Fenby himself – especially during the preparation of the afore-mentioned LP.
In his biography of the composer Sir Thomas has expressed the opinion that the outbreak of war in 1914 was the greatest single blow he suffered during his entire career (always excepting the blindness and paralysis which were surely the cruellest manifestations of that ultimately fatal disease – tertiary syphillis – which he had first contracted many years earlier). But Delius was no Nielsen: he was no supreme optimist whose ideals had been shattered; rather, he was the ultimate egocentric, and his seclusion in the countryside south of Paris had increased his indifference to the affairs of the outside world. The war was frankly inconvenient: it undermined his considerable fame in Germany (despite his German origins he was still regarded as an English composer) and compelled him to evacuate his idyllic house in Grez and return to England. Thus it destroyed the serenity which had become such an essential backcloth to his creative process. And so that period of his life (starting around 1900) which saw the composition of many of his greatest works – for example Sea Drift, A Mass of Life, The Song of the High Hills – was necessarily drawing to a close. There followed a series of works in which Delius (outwardly at least) subjected himself to the discipline of Classical forms. Such a departure was hardly to be expected of him, given that his only other ventures in this field (apart from revisions to the piano concerto) had been sparsely scattered through the years leading up to the turn of the century, before his eventual emergence as a fully mature artist. Thereafter the “Delius Sound” became ever more individual and progressively less receptive to mainstream European influences. So it is not surprising that the sonatas, concertos, and string quartet composed at this time bear little relationship to the traditional forms established by his predecessors; and it is not entirely clear why Delius should have chosen to subject himself to such strictures. Certainly he was stimulated by the playing of such artists as Beatrice and May Harrison, and especially Albert Sammons – in which case it would be significant that the most successful and truly characteristic of these compositions is the violin concerto, dedicated to that most underrated of great violinists.
The string quartet was the only work in this series not requiring a soloist (Delius never attempted a traditional symphony!) and the only one to be cast in the conventional four separate movements (as opposed to the freely rhapsodic single-movement form of the others). Although Sammons himself was the leader at its first performance the quartet is in no way first violin dominated. Indeed, the scoring is on the whole effective and (surprisingly) idiomatic, Delius’s feeling for individual lines making the instrumental parts eminently satisfying to play. Philip Heseltine was surely a little ungenerous that evening at Moncourt, when he flung down the score exclaiming that “Fred could not write for strings”! Maybe we could each have done with the odd bar’s rest (if only to turn the pages!) and just a fraction of time to change from bowing to plucking. Even if some of the double stops are rather awkward, there aren’t nearly so many as in Brahms and Dvořák. Eric Fenby once referred in passing to the piece as “a very unsatisfactory effort” (I would venture to suggest that he may have been feeling irritated at Delius’s outspoken attitude to late Beethoven – and in any case, he appeared to have changed his mind somewhat by the time we played it to him ourselves).
Occasionally (it must be conceded) the aforementioned “emotional inspiration and instinctive sense of flow” may have deserted him; but not, surely, in the first three sections of the string quartet. The writer Arthur Hutchings rightly admired the beauty and purposefulness of the opening movement, which is ideally contrasted by a lightweight and skittish scherzo (added a year later), with its good old plantation-hat tune at its centre. This is followed by a unique and exquisite example of the archetypal Delius tone poem in miniature – not surprisingly the most representative and memorable part of the whole work. Fenby writes touchingly of how Jelka Delius told him, “When we were away from home Fred missed the swallows most”; and the angular violin line which runs all the way through the central section seems to evoke most poignantly a picture of swallows weaving in and out of the eaves and trees in the garden at Grez.
Should the finale appear to be somewhat four square, repetitive, and lacking the true Delian touch, at least it is good fun – and tuneful, too, providing an undeniably effective conclusion to the whole quartet. Here, and elsewhere in the work, one can readily detect that characteristically pentatonic flavour in the melodic style – an influence stretching back to the workers’ songs he heard while trying (with limited success!) to grow oranges and grapefruit on his father’s plantation at Solana Grove, Florida, during the 1880s. Interestingly enough, the melody which emerges in the central part of Late Swallows (actually based on one of those songs: Come out Niggers, come out to cut the waving cane) had already appeared in no fewer than three compositions associated with this particular period of his life: the operas The Magic Fountain and Koanga, and the FloridaSuite. Together with the decidedly French tone of the first movement, and those characteristic harmonies (particularly in the outer parts of Late Swallows) which would eventually give rise to what we think of as the “English pastoral tradition”, these deep-south American touches combine to make the quartet the strongest single justification for the title of the late Christopher Palmer’s invaluable book: Delius the Cosmopolitan. Very few pieces by Delius end in such jolly spirits as this; one could almost imagine him chuckling to himself (with intentional irreverence, of course), “After all, it’s only a string quartet”!
At the end of an anniversary year of such immersion in this music – and we FSQ players were grateful to have had the opportunity (generously assisted by the Delius Trust) to perform the quartet nearly twenty times in 2012 alone – it was the words of Sir Neville Cardus which lingered in the memory most, writing so movingly of how this composer “recollects emotion in tranquillity … Delius is always reminding us that beauty is born by contemplation after the event”.
The Fitzwilliam has always gratefully acknowledged invaluable advice and encouragement in its interpretation of this work from a late and great authority: none other than Dr. Eric Fenby himself – who, after a performance in the composer’s home city of Bradford, announced that it was the best he had ever heard!
© Alan George
