1. Enchantment

Delius’s sudden conversion from “callow dilettante” to “young enthusiast who applied himself so ruthlessly to the mastery of musical science” (Christopher Palmer, Delius: Portrait of a Cosmopolitan, 2)

This happened soon after he arrived at Solano Grove in Florida (1884, age 22), having been sent there from England by his exasperated father. Palmer asks: “What had happened…to create so profound a change in him?” He says the answer is “the key to Delius’s musical personality.”

Delius told Fenby (his secretary much later) that it happened soon after he arrived “while alone in Nature in the wilderness.” This was when he says he first experienced “the creative urge.” Palmer stresses that when this happened, Delius was living in solitude: “Here for the first time he responded fully to the potency of natural beauty and to the terrible reality of its impermanence.”

Palmer quotes Cecil Gray, Musical Chairs, London, 1948, p. 191.

That which is known to the mystics as  “the state of illumination” is a kind of ecstatic revelation, which may only last for a split second of time, but which he who has known it spends the rest of his life trying to recapture…. The music of Delius is an example, and I was immediately aware of it in the first work of his I heard…I knew too the exact moment at which that experience must have occurred in Delius’s life, and when I asked him if it were so and if I were right, he was surprised and admitted that I was. The occasion was one summer night, when he was sitting out on the verandah of his house on the orange grove in Florida, and the sound came to him from the distance of voices of the Negroes in the plantation, singing in chorus. It is the rapture of this moment that Delius is perpetually seeking to communicate in all his characteristic work.

Palmer goes on to discuss the affinity the young Delius felt for the “Negroes”: “Their themes, voiced particularly in the spirituals and blues, were those of the sorrow of parting, insecurity and uprootedness, and they were themes which had already begun to preoccupy Delius even at this early stage.” (3)

Palmer argues that this BRIEF ENCHANTMENT (my words) affected Delius throughout his life: “ For Delius was one of those composers who never grow past a certain early stage in their development but merely see that stage in different perspectives as they grow older. The result in his case was music that explored with increasing intensity the same areas of feeling: he was never able to take past experiences and achievements for granted and constantly expand his universe.” (4)

Palmer concludes: “Delius’s music is the philosophy of a man who found life brief, bitter but beautiful; the brevity and the bitterness—the tragedy—had been revealed instantaneously to him in that split second of illumination [I could say, enchantment] on the verandah at Solano Grove.”

2. Significant Change in Personality

At the end of his Delius biography, Sir Thomas Beecham discussed a major change (“a metamorphosis of mind and spirit”) that the composer experienced in the early 1900s. Beecham describes this change in strong terms: from “a man overflowing with kindness and affection for his fellow creatures” to “the iron which had begun to enter his soul about 1902.” (Frederick Delius, 221)

Beecham sees this change in character affecting Delius’s music: “from that time on we hear gradually less of the poetry and charm which delighted us in Sea Drift and In a Summer Garden. In their place we have hitherto unfamiliar elements of austerity and impersonality…. This is markedly observable in two great works of transition A Song of the High Hills and North Country Sketches.” (221)

Some 13 years later Alan Jefferson tackled this issue in his biography of Delius: “Sir Thomas Beecham says that at this time and onwards, when Delius was suffering this change of temperament, ‘the iron was in his soul.’” This is a severe indictment which he makes no attempt to explain.” (Delius, 51) Jefferson goes on to explain the change: “Delius was more serious because he was working harder. He was less cheerful possibly because of the concern about his health, especially with regard to Jelka. He was more remote and aloof and intolerant of mankind the more he shut himself up in Grez. People do not have iron in their souls without good reason. Delius’s severe personal crisis left him with a new attitude of mind and a new capacity for music.” (221)

Apart from poor health and a commitment to Jelka Rosen, there were more “good reasons” for the change in Delius. A few dates help to clarify these:  

1897    Residence in Jelka’s home 

1899    First London concert, 

1901    Death of his father 

1903    Marriage to Jelka.

Once Delius moved in at Grez, his trips to Paris became increasingly infrequent as he gradually moved away from his Parisian high life. Then his first London concert stimulated his appetite for composing. Eric Fenby makes this point: “The actual sounds of his orchestral invention had fired his imagination afresh and cleared up so many technical problems that he could scarcely wait to get back home to his unfinished manuscript.” (Delius, 46) At the same time Fenby sees this experience forcing Delius to face facts: “Reluctantly he had come to realize he could never achieve what was in him to do unless he changed his way of life; this seemed impossible by staying in Paris.” (47) 

And there was yet another factor. Two years after his life-changing London concert, his father died. This meant that there would be no more financial support as the family business had been wound up. So Delius now had to see composing as a means of making a living. A lot more responsibility was needed.

The final step in Delius’s transformation was his marriage to Jelka. This commitment marked the end of his former indulgent bachelor life. But although there may have been more “iron” in his soul, I don’t feel that Beecham’s view was a “severe indictment.” He was describing the composer’s new self-discipline and determination. After all, Delius continued to have guests at Grez, and he maintained his friendship with Edvard Munch to the end of his life. It could be said in summary that Delius finally matured around the age of 40.

3. Influences According to Fenby

In his book Delius, Eric Fenby briefly discusses some of the composers who influenced Delius.

Debussy: Fenby writes: “…it seems that Delius’s practical interest in Debussy’s music was active only about the time of his writing of Summer Night on the River….He had written to Granville Bantock… “Do you knew that I have never in my life heard L’après-midi d’un faune or seen the music.” But Fenby also recounts that a neighbour of Delius, Alden Brooks, was once driven out of his home by Delius playing L’après-midi “for hours on end with the window open!” (79) This was in 1908.

            Fenby could recall only one occasion, in 1930, when Delius talked of Debussy: “I admire Debussy’s refinement, his orchestration, his conceptions, but I find his harmony mannered and his music deficient in melody.” (79)

Wagner:  Fenby talks of Delius’s “early dependence on Wagner,” asserting that  he “was incredibly slow to work through that influence.” (79) There were two more quotes: “Delius had studied Wagner for continuity” and “Wagner in Tristan and Isolde had showed him the way to continuity in A Village Romeo and Juliet, which he wrote in 1900-1.” (49)

Ravel: “With his detestation of German music, excluding certain works by Strauss, [and] his disdain of British music in general…Debussy and Ravel were the only composers who shared in some measure the refinement and taste of his own ideals. He had studied…Ravel for the balance of choir and orchestra, and certainly his string quartet.” (79-82)

Strauss: Delius had studied Richard Strauss “for orchestral fluency.” (47) “Of the handful of scores he possessed at Grez, half were by Richard Strauss. From Strauss he learnt how to balance great forces and construct on an extended time-scale.” (46)

4. Connection with Bela Bartok 1910-11

Delius met the 29-year-old Bela Bartok at a Zurich festival in May, 1910. Delius was attending for a performance of Brigg Fair; Bartok was performing his Rhapsody of Piano and Orchestra. Following this meeting Bartok wrote to Delius, expressing that he felt close to Delius, especially in the use of folk music.

Delius must have replied because Bartok sent a second letter with a score for Delius to comment on. There were three more letters where Bartok discussed some of his works

(Bluebeard’s Castle, for example). As well, he informed Delius that he admired The Mass of Life, which he had heard in Vienna. He especially praised Mittags (2:4) and “O Mensch! Du höherer Mensch, gieb’ acht!”: “These two parts are extremely moving in their simplicity and poetry: then we were very interested in the choirs without text. We haven't heard anything similar yet. I think you were the first to try something like this. I think that doing a lot of things in this way would have very strange effects..." (Sotheby’s.com)

This use of wordless chorus (“choirs without text”) appeared to Bartok and his friend Kodaly as particularly interesting. They were clearly unaware that Debussy had used a wordless chorus a few years earlier in his “Sirènes.” 

During this short-lived correspondence (June 1910 to July 1911), Delius also helped Bartok and his friend Kodaly with a copyright issue: “…if their works were published without the name of a non-Hungarian on the scores, they were instantly pirated in America, because neither Hungary nor Russia were signatories of the Berne Convention.” (Jeffers, 80)  Delius was happy to add his name as a “non-Hungarian,” to protect the copyright—a generous gesture.

But although both Delius and Bartok sought inspiration from folk music, they composed very different types of music. Here is Delius’s opinion on Bartok’s String Quartet #4, which he had heard on the radio in 1929: “I thought it was dreadful! I’m sick and tired to death of all this laboured writing, all this unnecessary complication, these harsh, brutal, and uncouth noises. How anybody can listen to such excruciating sounds with understanding and pleasure is beyond me!” (Eric Fenby, Delius as I Knew Him, 61)