Frederick Albert Theodore Delius CH (January 29, 1862, – June 10, 1934) was a composer born in Bradford in the West Riding of Yorkshire in the north of England.

Delius's parents were German. Julius and Elise Pauline Delius had moved from Bielefeld, Germany to England to set themselves up in the woollen business. Frederick ('Fritz' to his family, 'Fred' to his friends) Delius was the fourth of their fourteen children.

Although born in England, Frederick Delius felt little attraction for the country of his birth and spent most of his life abroad, in the United States and the continent of Europe, chiefly in France.

Although Frederick showed early musical promise, his father was very much set against a musical career and wanted Delius to work in the family business.

Julius Delius eventually sent Frederick (apparently at Frederick's request) to be the manager of an orange grove at Solano Grove on the St Johns River in Florida. There, west of St Augustine and south of Jacksonville, Delius continued to be engrossed in music and in Jacksonville met Thomas Ward who became his teacher in counterpoint and composition.

Delius apparently had an affair with one of the African-American girls who worked at the orange plantation in Solano Grove. After he returned to England in 1886, Delius discovered that his black mistress had borne him a child. A few years later, tormented by a deep sense of loss, Delius returned to Florida to seek his former mistress and the child. Frightened that he might want to remove the child and take it back to England, the girl fled and Delius never saw her again..

While in Florida, Delius had his first composition published, and later put his memories into the Florida Suite, written at Leipzig in 1887. The house he lived in from 1884–1885 in Solano Grove was given to Jacksonville University and moved on campus in 1961. The University holds the Delius Festival each year in honour of the composer. After he left Florida, Delius taught music in Danville, Virginia and eventually moved to New York.

Europe

After his stay in New York, his father finally agreed to allow him a musical education, and consented to send him to Leipzig to study at the conservatory. He was befriended there by Edvard Grieg, who encouraged him and became a lifelong friend.

In 1897 Delius met the German painter Jelka Rosen. They soon set up home in the French village of Grez-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau, but only married in 1903. Apart from a short time, when the area was threatened by the advancing German army during the First World War, he lived in Grez for the rest of his life.

In 1907 he met Sir (then Mr) Thomas Beecham, who was to be the greatest champion of his music during his lifetime in the English-speaking world. Until then Delius's audience was German, principally due to the conductors Fritz Cassirer and Hans Haym.

Delius's latter years were spent chiefly at the home he and his wife set up in Grez. These years were marred by increasing ill-health. As a young man (possibly in Paris) he had caught syphilis; the long term effects of which were to rob him of his sight and to cause him to become increasingly paralysed, eventually needing to use a wheelchair. He therefore employed Eric Fenby, who originally wrote Delius a fan letter, as his amanuensis and the great works of Delius's final years were dictated to Fenby, who later wrote a book about the experience of working with Delius. Fenby also wrote the screen adaptation from the book for a film, Song of Summer, directed by Ken Russell, starring Max Adrian as the blind composer.

Death and burial

Delius died at Grez in 1934 and was buried in a nearby cemetery on the Marlotte road out of Grez. The interment ceremony was unusual insofar as there was no priest, prayers or music (Delius was a devout atheist and admirer of Friedrich Nietzsche). In 1935 his remains were exhumed and brought from France to the UK, where an Anglican interment ceremony took place at the Church of Saint Peter in Limpsfield, Surrey. When Jelka Delius died the same year, she was interred with her husband. Coincidentally, Sir Thomas Beecham is buried in the same churchyard, approximately 10 metres away from Delius' grave.

Music

Delius's musical style is one of the most unusual in Western musical history. Characterized by a curious mixture of pentatonic figures and chromaticism, although still largely tonal, it reflects a move from the textbook post-romanticism of the years following the death of Richard Wagner (1883) to a style that was unique to Delius, blending Impressionism with the slightly older post-romanticism and northern European and African-American folk idioms. His use of luscious harmonies - mainly slow moving, and constantly evolving melody, with the frequent use of leitmotifs - is what prompted Sir Thomas Beecham to describe him as "the last great apostle of romantic beauty in music." His harmony and melody were influenced greatly by African-American music of the time, using blues harmony and melodic characteristics that would become distinctly jazz and blues 20 years later.

Some of his best-known works include the brief orchestral piece On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, Brigg Fair ('An English Rhapsody'), In A Summer Garden, North Country Sketches, A Mass of Life to Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra, Florida Suite, Sea Drift, a setting of text by Walt Whitman, for baritone, chorus and orchestra, A Late Lark, setting of text by William Ernest Henley, Songs of Farewell, another setting of Whitman texts, for chorus and orchestra, Cynara and Songs of Sunset, both settings of texts by Ernest Dowson, Koanga, which as an opera with a black principal character antedates George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess by four decades and is roughly contemporaneous with Scott Joplin's Treemonisha, an atheist Requiem, four concertos: a violin concerto, a cello concerto, a double concerto for violin and cello, and a piano concerto (also somewhat Gershwinesque); the colourful, picturesque tone poem Paris: Song of a Great City, and the beautifully exuberant symphonic composition Life's Dance. Orchestral excerpts from his operas, for example La Calinda from Koanga — which originated in the Florida Suite — and The Walk to the Paradise Garden from A Village Romeo and Juliet, are also played and recorded reasonably often. There are a number of chamber works (three mature violin sonatas, a cello sonata and a string quartet).

Operas

• Irmelin (1890-92; premiere 1953)

• The Magic Fountain (1893-95)

• Koanga (1895-97; UA 1904)

• A Village Romeo and Juliet (1900-01; premiere in Berlin 1907, London 1910 )

• Margot la rouge (1902)

• Fennimore and Gerda (1909-10; premiere 1919)

Incidental music

• Zanoni (1888)

• Folkeraadet (1897)

• Hassan (1920-23)

Concertos

• Suite for Violin and Orchestra (1888)

• Légende for Violin and Orchestra (1895)

• Piano Concerto in C minor (1897)

• Double Concerto for Violin, Cello and Orchestra (1915-16)

• Violin Concerto (1916)

• Cello Concerto (1921)

• Caprice and Elegy for Cello and Orchestra (1930)

Orchestral works

• Florida Suite (1887)

• Three Pieces (Schlittenfahrt and March caprice) (1887-88)

• Hiawatha. Tonepoem (1888)

• Idylle de Printemps (1889)

• Little Suite (1889-90)

• Three Small Tonepoems (Summer Evening, Winter Night, Spring Morning) (1890)

• Paa Vidderne (Sur les cimes). Symphonic Poem after Ibsen (1890-92; version with speaker 1888))

• Over the Hills and Far Away. Fantasy Overture (1895-97)

• Appalachia for Orchestra (1896)

• La ronde se déroule. Symphonic Poem (1899)

• Paris: The Song of a Great City (1899)

• Brigg Fair: An English Rhapsody (1907)

• In a Summer Garden. Rhapsody (1908)

• Dance Rhapsody no. 1 (1908)

• Life's Dance (1908?)

• Two Pieces for Small Orchestra (On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, 1912; Summer Night on the River, 1911)

• North Country Sketches (1913-14)

• Air and Dance for Strings (1915)

• Dance Rhapsody no. 2 (1916)

• Eventyr (Once Upon a Time) (1917)

• A Song Before Sunrise for Small Orchestra (1918)

• A Song of Summer (1929-30)

• Irmelin Prelude (1931)

• Fantastic Dance (1931)

Vocal works

• Six German Partsongs for Choir (1887)

• Sakuntala for Tenor and Orchestra (1889)

• Maud for Tenor and Orchestra (1891)

• Mitternachtslied for Baritone, Male Choir und Orchestra (1898)

• Appalachia for Choir und Orchestra (1898-1903)

• Sea Drift for Baritone, Choir and Orchestra (1903-04)

• A Mass of Life for Soloists, Choir and Orchestra (1904-05)

• Songs of Sunset for Mezzo-soprano, Baritone, Choir and Orchestra (1906-07)

• Cynara for Baritone und Orchestra (1907; completed 1929)

• On Craig Dhu for Choir and Piano (1907)

• Midsummer Song for Choir and Piano (1908)

• Wanderer's Song for Male Choir and Piano (1908)

• An Arabesk for Baritone, Choir and Orchestra (1911)

• A Song of the High Hills for Choir and Orchestra (1911)

• Two Songs for a Children's Album (1913)

• Requiem for Soprano, Baritone, Choir and Orchestra (1914-16)

• Two Songs to be sung of a Summer Night on the Water for Choir (1917)

• The splendour falls on castle walls for Choir (1923)

• A Late Lark for Voice und Orchestra (1925)

• Songs of Farewell for Choir and Orchestra (1930)

• Idyll: Once I passed through a populous city for Soprano, Baritone and Orchestra (1930-32)

Chamber music

• String Quartet (1888)

• Romance for Violin and Piano (1889)

• Violin Sonata B-major (1892)

• String Quartet (1893)

• Romance for Cello and Piano (1896)

• Violin Sonata No. 1 (1905-14)

• String Quartet (1916)

• Cello Sonata (1916)

• Violin Sonata No. 2 (1923)

• Violin Sonata No. 3 (1930)

Piano and cembalo music

• Dance for Cembalo (1919)

• Five Pieces for Piano (1922-23)

• Three Preludes for Piano (1923)

Songs

• Five Songs from the Norwegian (1888)

• Seven Songs from the Norwegian (1889-90; 2 orchestral songs)

• Three English Songs (1891)

• Two Songs after Verlaine (1895; with orchestra)

• Seven Danish Songs (1897; with orchestra)

• Four Songs after Nietzsche (1898)

• Im Glück wir lachend gingen (1898)

• The Violet (1900; with orchestra)

• Autumn (1900)

• Black Roses (1901)

• Summer Landscape (1902; with orchestra)

• The nightingale has a lyre of gold (1910)

• La lune blanche (1911; with orchestra)

• Chanson d'automne (1911)

• I-Brasil (1913)

• Four Old English Lyrics (1915-16)

• Avant que tu ne t'en ailles (1919)

• 18 unpublished songs

Bibliography

• Delius as I knew him by Eric Fenby, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-28768-5

• Delius: A Life in Letters, Vols 1 & 2 ed. Lionel Carley, Scolar Press, ISBN 1-85928-178-8

• Frederick Delius by Sir Thomas Beecham, Severn House Publishers, ISBN 0-7278-0099-X

• "Frederick Delius," by Anthony Payne, in The New Grove Twentieth-Century English Masters. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986, pp. 69-96. Reprint of article from The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Stanley Sadie, editor. London and Washington, D.C.: Macmillan, 1980.

• Frederick Delius by Peter Warlock

As an inspiration for other artists

• The song Delius by Kate Bush (from her 1980 album Never For Ever). The song and dance was performed by the artist for a bemused Fenby on the Russell Harty Show on the 25th November 1980.

• The characters Robert Frobisher and Vyvyan Ayrs appear to have been loosely inspired by Fenby / Delius in the 2004 Booker-nominated novel Cloud Atlas (ISBN 0-340-82277-5) by British author David Mitchell