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Frederick Delius (1862-1934): Appalachia (Variations on an Old Slave Song)

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Alun Jenkins, baritone / The Ambrosian Singers (Chorus master: John McCarthy)
The Hallé Orchestra - Sir John Barbirolli, conductor
Edition & Revision by Sir Thomas Beecham
Recorded in the Kingsway Hall, London, on July 15-17, 1970
Recorded under the auspices of the Delius Trust
The Musical World of Frederick Delius: Magic and Mystery, by John Coveney
THE CRITICISM of music (perhaps the better phrase would be ‘audience acceptance’) is at least fifty years behind that of painting. I know of no one whose enjoyment of Renoir is diminished or made impossible because Renoir painted unlike Rembrandt. Yet as long as Beethoven, Mozart, and Brahms are touchstones of evaluation in the concert hall and Verdi, Wagner, and Puccini serve that purpose in the opera house, the music of Delius will occupy a very narrow niche—even, with many people, a vacant one.
Still, the special magic and mystery of Delius’s music and the romantic-tragic story of his life have enthralled a sufficient number of people to justify the publication of five biographies in English (and a superb motion picture based on one of them) since his death only 36 years ago. Add to this impressive statistic a sixth biography, written 11 years before the composer’s death, and one must deduce that there is a substantial reason for such attention.
Yet any attempt to convey the effect of his music on the receptive listener must almost necessarily be less than satisfactory. After paragraphs ‘describing” the works of this most poetical of all composers we end, like Monsieur Jourdain, realizing we have been using prose all along. And for those readers who have no knowledge of Delius’s music, or whose acquaintance with Delius is limited to his popular morceaux, the literalness of words may even hinder further interest. The situation is somewhat reminiscent of tests run on newly-developed translating computers several years ago. As the story goes, the expression ‘Out of sight, out of mind” was fed into one — and was promptly transformed into another language as ‘blind and insane.’
In the best of Delius’s larger works we enter a world of dreaming, fantasy, and idylls. It is essentially a quiet and reflective world, not alien to melancholy; but above all it is a supremely sensuous one, allied to a pantheism that finds its most intense expression in a love, almost a worship, of nature. Just as surely as Schubert’s C major Quintet probes the soul, Bach’s Art of Fugue engages the cerebral listener, and Puccini’s operas arouse the emotions, Delius’s broad melodic lines and harmonic structures produce not only ravishing sounds but color and fragrance as well. At times a levitating, floating, almost tactile quality seems to give it an existence independent of the score or its performers, in somewhat the same way as a painting exists apart from its creator and its pigments. Perhaps it is this elusiveness that prompted Sir Thomas Beecham (in an interview years ago in the New York Sun) to observe that although he could write many pages of scores by Beethoven, Mozart, etc., even Richard Strauss, from memory, he could not do so with even one page of Delius.
Delius was a musical solitary sui generis, and had little interest in music other than his own. He is numbered among the handful of composers who are almost entirely underivative and who have had few, if any, followers.* Nowhere in his masterpieces do we find a polarity dependent upon the shattering orchestral tutti, ear-splitting fortissimi, and hurtling allegro molto vivace movements so dear to the virtuoso conductor and upon which the strenuously emotional listener feeds. Instead we experience a tension from different causes, particularly Delius’s extraordinarily personal harmonic idiom. One of his most readily identifiable characteristics is the manner in which he concludes so many of his scores, with dying-away cadences that linger to haunt the listener’s thoughts long after the piece itself has finished. The muted sorrow in the last bars of Sea Drift was written a full five years before the equally unforgettable finale of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde.
In my experience the most pithy summary of what Delius’s music can mean to the unprejudiced listener was uttered by a friend, totally blind since four, who is now in his fifties, a sophisticated musician, and an accomplished performer on the French horn. He once told me that he treasures the scores of Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Schumann, Richard Strauss, etc., but that only the music of Delius can convey to him some idea of what it must be like to see a glowing sunset! From The American Guide, May 1970, reprinted with kind permission of the publisher.
*Irving Kolodin, in his study of the influence of composers on their successors (The Continuity of Music, Alfred A. Knopf), omits any reference to Delius.— J.C.
The Hallé Orchestra - Sir John Barbirolli, conductor
Edition & Revision by Sir Thomas Beecham
Recorded in the Kingsway Hall, London, on July 15-17, 1970
Recorded under the auspices of the Delius Trust
The Musical World of Frederick Delius: Magic and Mystery, by John Coveney
THE CRITICISM of music (perhaps the better phrase would be ‘audience acceptance’) is at least fifty years behind that of painting. I know of no one whose enjoyment of Renoir is diminished or made impossible because Renoir painted unlike Rembrandt. Yet as long as Beethoven, Mozart, and Brahms are touchstones of evaluation in the concert hall and Verdi, Wagner, and Puccini serve that purpose in the opera house, the music of Delius will occupy a very narrow niche—even, with many people, a vacant one.
Still, the special magic and mystery of Delius’s music and the romantic-tragic story of his life have enthralled a sufficient number of people to justify the publication of five biographies in English (and a superb motion picture based on one of them) since his death only 36 years ago. Add to this impressive statistic a sixth biography, written 11 years before the composer’s death, and one must deduce that there is a substantial reason for such attention.
Yet any attempt to convey the effect of his music on the receptive listener must almost necessarily be less than satisfactory. After paragraphs ‘describing” the works of this most poetical of all composers we end, like Monsieur Jourdain, realizing we have been using prose all along. And for those readers who have no knowledge of Delius’s music, or whose acquaintance with Delius is limited to his popular morceaux, the literalness of words may even hinder further interest. The situation is somewhat reminiscent of tests run on newly-developed translating computers several years ago. As the story goes, the expression ‘Out of sight, out of mind” was fed into one — and was promptly transformed into another language as ‘blind and insane.’
In the best of Delius’s larger works we enter a world of dreaming, fantasy, and idylls. It is essentially a quiet and reflective world, not alien to melancholy; but above all it is a supremely sensuous one, allied to a pantheism that finds its most intense expression in a love, almost a worship, of nature. Just as surely as Schubert’s C major Quintet probes the soul, Bach’s Art of Fugue engages the cerebral listener, and Puccini’s operas arouse the emotions, Delius’s broad melodic lines and harmonic structures produce not only ravishing sounds but color and fragrance as well. At times a levitating, floating, almost tactile quality seems to give it an existence independent of the score or its performers, in somewhat the same way as a painting exists apart from its creator and its pigments. Perhaps it is this elusiveness that prompted Sir Thomas Beecham (in an interview years ago in the New York Sun) to observe that although he could write many pages of scores by Beethoven, Mozart, etc., even Richard Strauss, from memory, he could not do so with even one page of Delius.
Delius was a musical solitary sui generis, and had little interest in music other than his own. He is numbered among the handful of composers who are almost entirely underivative and who have had few, if any, followers.* Nowhere in his masterpieces do we find a polarity dependent upon the shattering orchestral tutti, ear-splitting fortissimi, and hurtling allegro molto vivace movements so dear to the virtuoso conductor and upon which the strenuously emotional listener feeds. Instead we experience a tension from different causes, particularly Delius’s extraordinarily personal harmonic idiom. One of his most readily identifiable characteristics is the manner in which he concludes so many of his scores, with dying-away cadences that linger to haunt the listener’s thoughts long after the piece itself has finished. The muted sorrow in the last bars of Sea Drift was written a full five years before the equally unforgettable finale of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde.
In my experience the most pithy summary of what Delius’s music can mean to the unprejudiced listener was uttered by a friend, totally blind since four, who is now in his fifties, a sophisticated musician, and an accomplished performer on the French horn. He once told me that he treasures the scores of Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Schumann, Richard Strauss, etc., but that only the music of Delius can convey to him some idea of what it must be like to see a glowing sunset! From The American Guide, May 1970, reprinted with kind permission of the publisher.
*Irving Kolodin, in his study of the influence of composers on their successors (The Continuity of Music, Alfred A. Knopf), omits any reference to Delius.— J.C.
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