Singers have no reason to complain that Delius neglected them. His six operas represent a substantial commitment, and the numerous works for voices and orchestra described in previous chapters cater for all sorts of vocal combinations, ranging from the epic grandeur of A Mass of Life, to the simple intimacy of the unaccompanied partsongs. The sheer range of these scores bears witness to Delius’s abiding love for the human voice, an affection that never left him and which spanned his entire creative career.

In addition, there are over sixty solo songs with piano accompaniment – a neglected part of Delius’s output, since only a handful are ever performed with any regularity. This chapter does not attempt to deal with each and every one, for that would require a book in itself. The intention is simply to offer a brief but representative survey, covering settings in six languages and ranging from the earliest examples, dating from the mid-1880s, to the final offerings of 1919. If a particular song has not been singled out for discussion, that does not by any means imply that it is unworthy; merely that the selection below is, by necessity, limited, and that the choices, inevitably, are subjective.

One of the problems in dealing with the songs is that, over the years, they have appeared in print in different formats: some were issued singly, others in collections; some appeared during the composer’s lifetime, others only posthumously. Moreover, they were originally issued by a variety of different publishing houses, many of them no longer in existence; the situation can be confusing, to say the least. To give one example: the collective title ‘Seven Danish Songs’ is now accepted as a convenient way of referring to the group of stylistically related songs which were composed during the 1890s and which were all subsequently orchestrated by Delius in 1897. He himself referred to them in his letters simply as ‘The Danish Songs’ and obviously thought of them as a group. Yet they were never published as a complete set during his lifetime, though five of them were performed at his self-promoted 1899 concert in London.