Delius’s Life and Times

In Musical Opinion for June 1962, Deryck Cooke wrote, ‘It is significant that there has been no thorough and comprehensive study of [Delius’s] music.’ Now, just over fifty years later, this is the first one.

A number of books have been written about Frederick Delius’s life, and there are probably very few, if any, new facts of significance still to be discovered about it. On the other hand, relatively little has been written about his music in detail. Arthur Hutchings’s Delius (1946) covers the highest proportion of the works, with a modest number of musical examples, in a little over half his book; Eric Fenby’s Delius as I Knew him (1936) and Delius (1971) do the same on a more restricted basis; Alan Jefferson’s Delius (1972) has twenty-one pages on ‘Delius’s craft’, again with a few examples; and, finally, there is Philip Heseltine (writing under his pseudonym Peter Warlock) in his Frederick Delius (1923, revised with additions, annotations and comments by Hubert Foss). All of them attempt to describe the music – more often than not extremely vividly – but not, however, to analyse how it is ‘put together’ and develops.

This book is therefore intended to make good that omission. It is, first and foremost, about the music – and is addressed both to ‘average’ or ‘ordinary’ listeners (if they will forgive the soubriquets) who are attracted to its sounds and style on a first or early hearing and can follow a score (or at least read music a little), and particularly to A-level and university students and researchers. The analyses and descriptions of the works are, however, interspersed with biography, critical reviews of their early performances, and (to a lesser extent), references to the contemporary English musical scene and a number of Delius’s closest friends.