TWO ‘LYRIC PIECES’ FOR SMALL ORCHESTRA: A TRIBUTE TO GRIEG

That Delius was still preoccupied with orchestral music and the symphonic poem is indicated by his return to the score Lebenstanz, or Life's Dance as he now preferred to call it. After an airing under Enrico Fernandez Arbós in London in January 1908, Delius withheld the work. Still unpublished in 1912, it was revised with a new conclusion for publication by Tischer & Jagenberg of Cologne and first performed in this version (in the presence of the composer) by its dedicatee, Oskar Fried, in Berlin on 15 November 1912; the first English performance of the work was given by Balfour Gardiner at Queen's Hall on 25 February 1913. Delius always considered this symphonic poem to have been seminal to his development as a composer, and believed, as he explained to Tischer & Jagenberg, that it was among his finest orchestral essays, save for the frustration he had earlier felt for the conclusion: ‘I consider the “Dance of Life” really to be my best orchestral work. I have had it in my file for some years now, as the ending did not quite satisfy me; but at last I have found what I was looking for & it is now a fully mature work’. This and the revised version of In a Summer Garden rejuvenated his commitment to the genre of the symphonic poem and this was confirmed with the composition of Zwei Stücke für kleines Orchester, written between 1911 and 1912 and also published by Tischer & Jagenberg in 1914. Until the composition of these two works for small orchestra, and since his accession to the Straussian paradigm of the ‘high’ romantic orchestral canvas, Delius had been unbending in his demands for the largest of instrumental forces and for the procurement of rare instruments such as the bass oboe and sarrusophone. No-one more aware of this was Grainger who, by 1912, was enjoying a good deal of success with the ‘multi-scorings’ of his folksong arrangements and other original pieces.