Mr Fritz Delius of Bradford (England), was born at the above mentioned place on 29 January 1862, he was accepted as a student at the Royal Conservatorium of Music in Leipzig on the 30 August 1886 (sub.no. 4486) and at Easter 1888 he was honourably discharged from the above mentioned place. In this period he undertook study in the Theory of Music; in Practical Piano, in Practical Violin, as well as in the History and Aesthetics of Music performance and, assisted by a strong capacity [for this work] he has made ‘substantial and most respectable’ progress. Mr Delius has a very advanced and excellent knowledge of the Theory of Music; in Practical Composition ‘he is on the way through solid practice to a most valuable development’; he has ‘some knowledge’ in the History and Aesthetics of Music.

Mr Delius’s moral demeanour at the Conservatorium has been ‘exemplary’.

The unanimous conclusion above is based on the particular assessments by the relevant teachers at the Institute as well as on personal knowledge.

Directorial-diploma conferred on Mr Fritz Delius of Bradford and completed to-day in good faith.

Leipzig 17 January 1889.

Particular results have been awarded personally by the following undersigned teachers from the Institute. [Signatures follow.]

Report 1

(September 1886–March 1887)

Theory of Music

He was a hard-working and conscientious student for quite a while. He did not attend during the latter stages of the course. He worked thoroughly through the course in theory up to fugue. He was not here for Easter but before that he was hard-working and composed some nice things.

On top of all their other problems, Delius and Jelka’s ‘close and multilayered friendship’ with Ida Gerhardi now came under considerable strain. It dated back to Jelka’s and Ida’s time at the Académie Colarossi, and remained very strong until about 1902, when, for unknown reasons, Delius began to turn his back against Ida, and the friendship seriously cooled and possibly even came close to extinction. The problem, of course, was that Ida and Jelka had always been rivals for Delius’s affections, and Ida – who had very recently finished her second portrait of him – must have been devastated when he married Jelka in the autumn of 1903. There was a reconciliation in 1909, perhaps brought about by Ida’s learning of Delius’s increasing health problems, and all three of them attended a number of concerts of his music together. In 1912, however, Ida caught pneumonia and pleurisy, and gave up her studio in Paris, and the following year she went back to her family home in the Westphalian town of Lüdenscheid – where she remained, a permanent invalid, until her death in 1927. As a result, she was cut off from the Deliuses, and this time, once the War had started, it was probably her very strong pro-German inclinations that seriously risked bringing the relationship to an end for a second time: she wrote to another friend, ‘the Deliuses are so very English that, since understanding is impossible, I have broken off from them; they were particularly malicious in Copenhagen.’ Nevertheless the underlying bond proved sufficiently strong for such manifest and seemingly entrenched attitudes not in fact to endanger the friendship’, with Jelka telling Grainger in 1925 of her disappointment that Ida could not come to help her cope with Delius’s ill-health.

Reasonably happily ensconced in Grove Mill House – although he complained about the cold – it was not long before Delius began writing again.

Air and dance

(1915: RT VI/21; CE vol. 27b)

This is Delius’s only work for string orchestra – attractive and relatively brief. The Air, with its stepwise melodic line and predominantly dotted rhythms, introduced by a solo violin, has the flavour of a Celtic folksong.

Frederick Delius died at his home in Grez-sur-Loing on 10 June, 1934, in appalling agony, with Jelka beside him in a wheelchair.

Jelka herself had been very seriously ill for several months before Delius’s death, having two major operations, and on 16 May she wrote to Fenby:

He was there within days. The contrast between the beautiful French countryside he had come to love and his friend’s condition was dreadful, and as soon as he arrived, he went upstairs, ‘took the delicate hand he offered me and kissed his brow, for he was weeping like a child’. Over the next three weeks Delius’s condition alternated between slight improvement and increasing deterioration, and it had not been helped by the news of the deaths of Elgar on 23 February, and Norman O’Neill ten days later. Local doctors and nurses performed temporary wonders, but there was no question but that Delius would soon follow them.

Many years before, Delius had told the Harrison sisters’ mother that he wanted to be buried in a country churchyard in England, but as a temporary measure he was laid to rest in the cemetery at Grez on 12 June. In due course, St Peter’s Church at Limpsfield in Surrey was chosen, and almost exactly a year later Fenby accompanied the coffin from France for the reburial on 26 May 1935. It was estimated that the occasion drew about 1,000 people to the church; Beecham gave an oraison funèbre, and conducted a section of the London Philharmonic Orchestra in Summer Night on the River, the serenade from Hassan and On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring. Tragically, Jelka came down with pneumonia on her way to England for the service, was unable to attend, and died on 28 May 1935 in a Kensington nursing home.

Delius continued to be an inveterate traveller – sometimes with Jelka accompanying him – happily now more often than not attending rehearsals for, and performances of, his music. In the January and February of 1906 he was in Berlin helping Oscar Fried with Appalachia; in May it was Essen for the premiere of Sea Drift; and in the high summer he was in Norway for the tenth time, spending over two months at Aasgaardstrand, where he did a lot of walking. From September until the end of the year, however, he was at home, revising the Piano Concerto and making a start on Songs of Sunset.

Delius had had seventeen songs published in London and Paris between 1890 and 1896, but otherwise all his attempts to interest publishers in his music failed completely. Between 1896 and 1905 nothing else was published, despite his having to his credit forty-five completed works (or movements of suites, etc., and including two operas), another twenty-five or so songs, and a few piano pieces. All performances were therefore given from copyists’ manuscripts, or possibly, early on, from the original autograph full scores and orchestral parts in Delius’s own hand. The use of copyists’ parts of a number of Delius’s works continued not only up to the end of his life, but even after it – for example Paris was not published until 1909; Cynara was written in 1907, first performed in 1929, but not printed and published until 1931; while, even more remarkably, the Drei symphonische Dichtungen of 1889–90, premiered in 1946, only appeared in print in 1951.

Finding a sympathetic publisher simply proved extremely difficult – although certainly not for the lack of trying on Delius’s part. He approached the Danish firm of William Hansen and, in Germany, Aibl Verlag, Forberg, Kahnt, Kistner, Lauterbach & Kuhn and Siegel – all to no effect. However, in 1906, he did eventually establish a relationship with Harmonie, who agreed to publish Appalachia and Sea Drift (see above, Chapter 4). In 1906 and 1907 Harmonie went on to publish Five Songs, A Village Romeo and Juliet, A Mass of Life and the Piano Concerto.

Ever since the Deliuses had left their comfortable home for Orléans in September 1914, they had suffered one disruption after another, but by now, despite bouts of depression and ill health, Delius had miraculously recovered the energy and inspiration he needed to go on writing. 1914 had seen the completion of North Country Sketches; 1915, the Double Concerto; and in 1916, the Requiem, the String Quartet, A Dance Rhapsody no. 2, the Violin Concerto and the Cello Sonata. Then in 1917 he finished Eventyr, revised the quartet, and wrote two of his three most beautiful partsongs – and in 1918, he produced A Song before Sunrise and most of the Poem of Life and Love.

Now, however, following the end of the War, the next five years were an almost continuous round of journeys (most of them doubtless extremely exhausting) to concerts or operas in London and Germany, holidaying in Norway and southern Europe, and to German sanatoria for ‘cures’, with very little time spent at Grez. Depression, indeed, rather than physical ailments, became an increasingly serious problem – brought on by a number of things. The vandalism of the house at Grez had upset the Deliuses beyond measure; for a considerable time they had been virtual refugees in England, separated from most of their possessions; Beecham had more or less given up conducting Delius’s music – indeed, he was hardly giving any orchestral concerts at all, and what time and energy he had to spare from trying to resolve his financial problems was spent in the opera house – so the Deliuses saw little or nothing of their great friend; and finally they were short of money, unable to recover assets which they held in Germany. Post-war England was a grim place: inflation had almost doubled, the value of the pound had plummeted by over 60 percent, and:

Music does not seem to be very flourishing in London at present: the price of everything goes up and there is no increase of audiences, but rather the reverse, so that the loss on concerts is greater than ever.

Finally, the lawyer on whom Delius was relying in his dispute with Universal, Franz Heinitz, had died.

It seems appropriate now to take stock of what had happened in the rest of the musical world during the time covered by the previous chapters, and of where Delius stood at the end of it.

Although he had been composing seriously for fourteen years, only a few of his works had been heard in public: On the Mountains, Over the Hills, the Légende, the incidental music to Folkeraadet, Mitternachtslied Zarathustras, La Ronde se déroule and Paris, with excerpts from Koanga – all just once each (except for On the Mountains, which had been played twice) and all, except for Paris, at the 1899 St James’s Hall concert. Despite the apparent success of that venture, between then and 1907, when the Piano Concerto was given its second performance, nothing else is known to have been performed anywhere in the United Kingdom. Delius had not yet broken through the barrier of acceptance.

Since the time of Johann Sebastian Bach, music had played a much greater part in everyday German life than it did in England – every town of any size, particularly in the Rhineland and Thuringia, had its director of music, an opera house, an orchestra and choirs – and there was therefore a continual movement of conductors, performers and, consequently, musical news between them. It was accordingly not in the least unusual that Buths moved from Elberfeld to Düsseldorf; or that Cassirer went from Lübeck to Posen, then to Saarbrücken, to Elberfeld, and finally to Berlin. Over a period of years many more German concert-goers got to hear much more new and unfamiliar music – even that of Delius – than was the case in England. By 1902, German audiences had heard, and seemed to have no great difficulty with the extraordinary complexities and new sounds of, the first four of Mahler’s symphonies, all Strauss’s tone poems except for the Sinfonia domestica and Alpensinfonie, the first two of Scriabin’s symphonies and his early piano music, as well as Rachmaninoff’s Symphony no. 1 and Piano Concerto no. 2 – while Schoenberg had started his huge and strange Gurrelieder. Admittedly (apart from Schoenberg) those composers had all had a proper musical education, but nevertheless their music was worlds away from what was concurrently being played in England.

When Delius was born, in 1862, music-making was flourishing in England – in cathedrals, churches, town halls, village halls and private houses. On the other hand, it was 167 years since the death of the last English composer of real note, Henry Purcell (1659–95), and the most highly regarded composers in the second half of the nineteenth century were probably Sir George Smart (1776–1869); Sir Alexander Macfarren (1813–87), who wrote a vast amount of music, including nine symphonies and twenty-four operas; Sir William Sterndale Bennett (1816–75), whose best music was for the piano; and Sir John Stainer (1840–1901), most of whose work was religious and included the wellknown oratorio The Crucifixion. By today’s standards, however, their music was at best only competent and mildly interesting. Their better works can be enjoyable on an occasional hearing, but there is no question of their having the stature of their Continental counterparts: in Germany, Brahms, Bruckner, Wagner and Liszt; in France, Fauré, Bizet, Saint-Saëns and Franck; and, in Russia, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Musorgsky, Balakirev and Borodin – a good number of whom were well advanced in their careers, and writing some of their finest works.

The well-known gibe referring to England as being Das Land ohne Musik (The Land without Music) probably dates from the mid-1880s. At that time, however, the astonishing English Musical Renaissance is generally considered to have started – with the premiere of the thirty-two-year-old Hubert Parry’s ‘dramatic cantata’ Scenes from Shelley’s ‘Prometheus Unbound’ at the 1880 Gloucester Three Choirs Festival; when Hans Richter conducted the first performance of Elgar’s Variations on an Original Theme (‘Enigma’) in London’s St James’s Hall on 19 June 1899, it could be said with true certainty that English music was at long last alive and well again. The style was still very Germanic – but from the mid-1880s, three young composers, two English and one French, began writing music that was completely different from anything that had ever been heard before. Little of it owed anything to the old forms: it was full of new harmonies, new choral and orchestral sounds, using a wider range of metre (although always with an underlying musical pulse), and it mirrored the rise of the Impressionist school of painting. They were Ralph Vaughan Williams, Frederick Delius and Claude Debussy.