DELIUS - Key Persons
Fritz Theodor Albert Delius was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, England, on 29 January 1862 to parents who had come to England from Bielefeld, Germany. Julius, his father, was a prosperous businessman in one of Yorkshire's great Victorian industries, wool. The home was a musically cultured one, and, as a boy, Fritz learned to play both violin and piano proficiently before he reached his teens. After attending Bradford Grammar School (1874-8), he spent two years studying at the International College near London, and then some apprentice years in his father's business.
These were characterised by a growing frustration with business life, and in March 1884, Fritz persuaded his father to let him try his hand at cultivating oranges in Florida, USA. His plantation, Solano Grove, was some hours upstream from Jacksonville on the banks of the St. John's River. Once there, he quickly secured a piano and found a local source for theory lessons, a Jacksonville organist named Thomas Ward, an important early influence. He also absorbed the sounds of the singing of African American workers, which were to be documented in his Florida Suite of 1886-7. Delius stayed there for a year and a half, before moving on to Danville, Virginia, with sufficient confidence to teach music in his own right.
Julius Delius now gave in to his son's request for a full musical education and Fritz enrolled at the Leipzig Conservatorium where he studied from 1886-8. On leaving Leipzig, set on the course of his life's work, he went to Paris, where he was to remain based for almost a decade. He soon moved on from composing songs and small-scale instrumental and orchestral pieces to produce the operas Irmelin (1890-2), The Magic Fountain (1894-5) and Koanga (1895-7). There were also larger orchestral works, some with solo voices, Paa Viderne (1888), Sakuntala (1889) and Maud (1891), while 1889 saw the completion of the symphonic poem Life's Dance (first version) and the nocturne Paris. The eclecticism in these works is evident, his inspiration deriving from the literature of England, Norway, Denmark, Germany and France, medieval romance, First Nation and African Americans, the Florida landscape and the Scandinavian mountainscape'.
During his Paris period, Delius had little opportunity to have his larger scores played, and it was not until 1897 that the chance came to hear how his music really sounded, when he attended performances in Oslo of the play Folkeraadet, for which he had composed incidental music. Immediately afterwards, he travelled to Germany for the first orchestral performance in that country of a work of his, Over the hills and far away. It was conducted by Hans Haym who, with Julius Buths, was to be instrumental in popularising Delius's music in Germany in the first decade of the new century. An all-Delius concert in London in 1899, however, met with mixed success. In the meantime, he had become friends with a German painter, Helene Jelka Rosen, whom he met in Paris in 1896. The next year he moved in to share her house at Grez-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau, and this was his home for the rest of his life. He and Jelka married in September 1903, by which time he had anglicised his name to Frederick.
Now came Delius's high musical summer, which was to last from 1901, when he completed his operatic masterpiece, A Village Romeo and Juliet, to almost the end of the first World War. Appalachia dates from 1902, Sea Drift from 1903/4, and the large-scale A Mass of Life was composed during 1904/5. Then came Songs of Sunset(1906/7), Brigg Fair (1907), In a Summer Garden (1908, revised 1912) and the first of the two Dance Rhapsodies (1908). Much of 1909/10 was devoted to his last opera, Fennimore and Gerda. An Arabesque and The Song of the High Hills date from 1911, and from 1911/12 came the popular On hearing the first cuckoo in spring and Summer night on the river. These two pieces, together with The Walk to the Paradise Garden (an intermezzo extracted from A Village Romeo and Juliet) have earned their composer a quite unmerited reputation as a maker principally of pastoral miniatures. In 1907, Appalachia was heard at a London concert by, among others, the English conductor Thomas Beecham: he quickly assumed the mantle of Delius's greatest protagonist, and retained it until his death in 1961.
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