Delius: A Song Before Sunrise
Fritz – changed to Frederick around the time of his marriage in 1903 – Delius was born In Bradford, not far from here [York]. Over the years, it has become rather too facile to view Delius as an archetypal representative of the early twentieth century 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 in “God’s Own Country” until the age of 22, at which point he left England virtually for good – initially to run his father’s orange grove in Florida. From there, he moved on to Leipzig, then Paris, interspersed with various sojourns in Scandinavia, and finally settling in the village of Grez-sur-Loing, near the forest of Fontainebleau. So it is that there could be no more appropriate title for a study of the composer than Christopher Palmer’s Delius the Cosmopolitan. Furthermore, it was the Norwegian Grieg who persuaded Julius Delius that his son really 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”.
In his indispensable history book, Man and his Music, Prof Wilfrid Mellers devotes an entire chapter to “Delius, Sibelius, and Nature”, thereby linking them through the pantheistic essence of both their musical languages. They met more than once, sitting together at concerts in Paris and Birmingham – where Delius heard and admired the Finnish master’s latest symphony (No.4). He also knew No.5 through records brought to Grez by Elgar (via aeroplane!) in May 1933. Ultimately, however, the two musicians who became Delius’s dearest friends (outside the extraordinary relationship with his amanuensis, Eric Fenby) were the young composers Percy Grainger and Philip Heseltine (alias Peter Warlock). No amount of space in a programme note can do justice to the part they each played in the Delius household, and listeners 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.
It was Heseltine who received the dedication of this exquisite miniature; Alan Jefferson suggests it “shows Delius’s art crystallized into the small space of 135 bars (six minutes’ playing time) and written for a handful of instruments….” As much dance as song, its brief central section perfectly encapsulates Neville Cardus’s vision of how he “recollects emotion in tranquillity…. Delius is always reminding us that beauty is born by contemplation after the event”. Fenby himself clearly agreed, asserting that “In the best of Delius we are made one with Nature. No man has given musical utterance to all her moods, but in the expression of her tranquillities he excelled all others” – no more so than in the rapt closing bars of A Song Before Sunrise, even with its intended moment of specific characterisation: Fenby recalls that “…he asked if I had heard the cock-a-doodle-doo in the clarinets at the end!”.
© Alan George
