Delius: beauty in the ear of the beholder
His life was as romantic and colourful as his exquisite music, yet
his works are rarely performed today. Delius deserves better, writes
Julian Lloyd Webber.
No other composer polarises opinion like Delius. You either love or
loathe his music. And it is rare to find someone who has grown to like
it. Although this coming year - the 150th anniversary of his birth -
will bring opportunities to reassess his work, that central fact will
never change.
I feel as if I have known Delius's music forever. My father was a
devotee and I must have heard all of his most famous works (On Hearing
the First Cuckoo in Spring, The Walk to the Paradise Garden, La Calinda,
et al) well before I started playing his cello music. I always felt
instinctively attuned to Delius's unique musical language, which seemed
akin to watching a painting that is slowly changing in a constantly
moving canvas of sound. Under the inspirational guidance of Delius's
amanuensis, Eric Fenby, I included his Cello Sonata both at my Wigmore
Hall debut in 1971 and on my first recording, made the following year.
There have been many biographies of Delius, each approaching its
subject from a different viewpoint, but all his biographers agree on one
thing: Delius was Delius; steadfastly uninfluenced by fashions, he
remained his own man, both in his music and his personal life.
One of 14 children, Frederick Delius was born in 1862 in Bradford,
Yorkshire. His father, Julius, was a wealthy wool merchant of German
extraction, to whom the idea of his son pursuing a career in music was a
total anathema. Instead, at 22, Delius was sent to Florida to run an
orange plantation on the banks of the St Johns River, 30 miles from
Jacksonville. But this setting proved more conducive to writing music
than planting oranges, and Delius loved to sit on his verandah,
absorbing the sound of the negro workers singing as they toiled on the
plantation. Much of his time was spent romancing a mixed-race girl named
Chloe who, it has been widely conjectured, bore him a son.
In Jacksonville, Delius met Thomas Ward, a local organist who taught
him the basics of musical theory. By the following summer, Delius had
had enough of commerce and set forth for Danville, Virginia, where he
had secured a job as a music teacher. Grudgingly, in the autumn of 1886
his father consented to allow him to enrol in a course of musical
studies at Leipzig Conservatoire where Delius encountered Edvard Grieg.
The world-renowned Norwegian composer would finally convince Delius's
father that his son's future could only lie in music.
Delius settled in Paris, where he soon became a familiar figure in
artistic circles. Within a few years he was able to count August
Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen, Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin among his
friends. But in 1895 - at the age of 33 - Delius received the news that
would change the course of his life forever: he had contracted syphilis
- a long and protracted death sentence. Shortly after learning his fate
he composed the song Through Long, Long Years, to words by the Norwegian
poet JP Jacobsen, which Delius translated himself: "Through long, long
years we must atone/ For what was but a trifling pleasure." The
following year, Delius met the artist Jelka Rosen. Jelka adored him and
was prepared to forsake her own considerable talents to help Delius.
- Guardian
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