Of all men in any walk of life that I have known during a career spent almost as much in other countries as in my own, Frederick Delius is the most remarkable. His biographers have styled him an Englishman, born of German parents settled in Yorkshire in the early part of the nineteenth century, and this is correct so far as it goes. But it does not take us nearly far enough in probing the problem of a highly complex personality, and the truth is that Delius was of no decided nationality but a citizen of all Europe, with a marked intellectual bias towards the northern part of it. His family was almost definitely of Dutch origin, and some time in the sixteenth century had changed its patronymic from Delij or Deligh to a latinized form of it, a common enough practice at the time. A member of it was numbered among the chaplains of Edward VI of England and others are traceable to Spain, France and Germany. But whatever were the diverse elements that united to make up the increasing amalgam of Frederick, anything less Teutonic would be hard to imagine. His earthy solidity and delicate romanticism were English, his uncompromising logic and analytical insight French, and his spiritual roots went down deep to that layer of far northern culture which, half Icelandic, half Celtic, gave birth centuries ago to the beautiful folk-music of Scotland and Ireland and in the nineteenth century to the boundless imaginative genius of Ibsen.

Appalachia, Delius's first choral work—for orchestra and chorus rather than chorus and orchestra—began life (in 1896) as a set of orchestral variations on an old slave song. In 1902, however, Delius had vocal after-thoughts; he added choral parts to some of the variations and concluded the whole with a rousing choral finale. Excluding the finale, the vocal contributions take the following shape: (a) a choral (a cappella) variation—a heavily chromaticized harmonization of the slave song (“After night has gone comes the day”); (b) choral punctuations of certain variations, codas by distant la-la-ing, chordal sighs on ‘Ah!’, or wordless presentation of the ascending first phrase of the slave song. Appalachia, despite the vocal contributions, remains largely instrumental, and need not long detain us as an example of Delius's choral music. The finale, for all its ingenious manipulation of thematic material previously heard in instrumental guise, amounts to little more than a picturesque summing-up of Delius's evocation of the sights and sounds of the Mississippi. Of more significance for the future are the always very brief but deeply poetical vocal interventions in the orchestral texture. In Appalachia these disembodied voices have only a small rôle—tail-pieces within codas, so to speak—but Delius thereby disclosed his instrumental conception of voices which was fully to materialize itself in the subsequent Song of the High Hills, the two a cappella and wordless choruses To be sung of a summer night on the water, and the dance sections of A Mass of Life.

In the ultimate assessment of Delius's art it is conceivable that his songs will occupy a somewhat minor place. In bulk, they do not loom very large in the catalogue of his works—a mere fifty or so in all, and of these perhaps a sixth were apparently not deemed by the composer worthy of publication. Yet it would be a pity to underrate them merely on the ground of their slender numbers or because Delius himself was apt in later life to deprecate, more especially, his early efforts. For it is sometimes the case that a composer will reveal himself and his idiosyncrasies in his first stumbling attempts and even more readily in the miniature than in the larger composition. Delius did not spring into the world fully armed but his basic idiom changed relatively little and no one can fail to find traces of the authentic Delius finger-print in his songs of all periods.

An otherwise valuable chapter in a German text-book on Musical Form is erroneously entitled “Logic and Coherence in Music,” for it deals only with treatments of motives and methods of reference; they alone cannot ensure logic and coherence, otherwise the sentence “Every thirty trees through a tuba are sweeter than a door” would be as logical and coherent as “Any two sides of a triangle are greater than a third” grammatically the sentences are identical. A story is told of Vaughan Williams's asking a candidate at Cambridge: “What do you mean by development?” After a silence, the answer was: “I don't really know,” to which R.V.W. rejoined: “Neither do I”! That motive reference is one important means of unifying an act or a whole opera, that it often offers a clue to the deeper integrity that defies analysis, and that it probably exists, used unconsciously or too subtly to be recognised, in works avoided by analysts, I do not deny. (It certainly exists in Boris Godunoff, yet Moussorgsky was at pains to avoid classical development, or Wagnerian Leitmotive machinery, or anything he considered a German stylization).

The programme of the first concert of Delius's works, at the old St. James's Hall in May, 1899, contains little of instrumental music that is outstanding. There are some rarely beautiful songs, there is a remarkable selection from the opera Koanga; but of the instrumental works only one remains which we sometimes hear still performed today. Over the Hills and Far Away is a characteristic and indeed beautiful piece, and were it to stand alone would arouse the interest and admiration of perceptive students; for us its interest is in part historical, as the earliest essay in Delius's mature style, in part aesthetic as something like an elaborated sketch for the greater works that were to follow during the ensuing twenty years. That same year, 1899, on the other hand, itself produced the first of the later masterpieces—Paris.

In England musical biography, in spite of its tempting possibilities has not yet attracted the attention of the zealous disciples of Freud and Jung. Composers, and even famous prima donna conductors, have so far escaped psychoanalytical scrutiny of their Libido, Oedipus, and ego-complexes. Free of such analysis, the new edition of Peter Warlock's (Philip Heseltine) book on the life and works of Frederick Delius with additions, annotations and comments by Hubert Foss (The Bodley Head, 15/- net) offers the reader fascinating and self-revealing portraits of two of the strangest figures in English music.