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

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.

[calefonxcalectric]

In the annals of art and literature, parental hostility has almost been traditional. Perhaps the most extreme example was Elizabeth Barret Browning’s father who so resented her marriage that not only did he never forgive her, but sent an accounting for her upbringing and education to her husband, including a bill for her mother’s accouchement. Although Julius Delius, a very successful wool merchant of Bradford, England, did not quite achieve this exquisitely refined sense of civilized torture, he is nonetheless in history’s vanguard of iron-willed fathers determined to thwart the ideals and genius of their progeny.

Aghast at the notion of a musician in the family, he sent his son, Frederick, to America in March 1884 to manage 120 acres of orange groves he had acquired in Florida on the St. Johns River, some miles south of Jacksonville. (The little four-room cottage where he lived has been rebuilt and moved to Jacksonville where it now can be seen on the campus of the University.) Delius arrived in Florida with a sense of relief at the prospect of solitude in the midst of a luxuriant natural landscape, following a miserably unhappy turn in his father’s Manchester office. In all he lived not quite two years in America, the first eighteen months on the Solano property and in Jacksonville, and the remainder as a music teacher, mostly to the daughters of wealthy tobacco growers, in Danville, Virginia.

It is unfortunate that the image most people have of Delius is the wraith-like, ascetic figure in the famous portrait by James Gunn, painted in the last years of his life when he was a blind paralytic. When Delius left for America he was an exuberant, sensitive young man of twenty-two and to settle in Florida, entirely within the temperate zone and surrounded by tropical waters, must have been an extremely exotic experience for one so recently from the manufacturing midlands of England (although he had been to London and on one short visit to Paris). That he became fascinated by the landscape and the music he heard on all sides from the American Negro, and all but forgot his responsibilities to the oranges, is not surprising. Music again became his total preoccupation more than it had ever been, and he started serious studies in harmony and counterpoint with Thomas F. Ward, organist of the Catholic cathedral in Jacksonville.

The years were 1884-86 and the American Civil War had ended only nineteen years before his arrival. The ‘Reconstruction Era, ’ which was almost as ruinous as the War itself, had officially ended only seven years earlier. In Florida alone there were at least 25, 000 Negroes who were either freedmen or first generation descendants. Delius had not yet composed anything beyond a few exercises, nor would he until he returned to Europe. When he died nearly fifty years later he left published works comprising six operas, incidental music for two plays, eight choral works with orchestra, five unaccompanied choral works, six compositions for orchestra and solo voices, forty-eight songs, ten chamber works, five instrumental concertos, fifteen large orchestral works, five pieces for small orchestra, and eight miscellaneous items plus various piano transcriptions of orchestral works.

An opera, ‘Koanga, ’ and an orchestral set of variations with chorus and baritone soloist, ‘Appalachia, ’ are his American musical memoirs. He started ‘Appalachia’ in 1896, ten years after he left America and finished it in 1902. Its earliest drafts included musical allusions to ‘Dixie’ and ‘Yankee Doodle’ which were wisely eliminated later. To anyone hearing the work in its final form, it seems incomprehensible that Delius ever considered such intrusions. In choosing the title Delius acted in much the same way Dvorak did in subtitling his fifth symphony, ‘From the New World.” Appalachia was the name North American Indian tribes gave to the American continent, such as they knew it. In modern times it is also the name of the enormous belt of mountain ranges extending from Newfoundland south by southwest to central Alabama, and more specifically the name of an area of 165, 000 square miles from Pittsburgh to Birmingham noted for its beauty, inaccessibility in many places, and poverty.

Delius of course used it in its first and oldest sense, and subtitled his score, ‘Variations on an old Slave Song, with Final Chorus.” In reality, the composition contains two distinct ‘songs’. The theme itself is taken from a Negro hymn, ‘No Trouble in that Land Where I’m Bound.” The other, a tragic song, ‘Oh, Honey, I am Going Down the River in the Morning, ’ is introduced in its entirety as a finale, and was taught to Delius by his Solano overseer, Elbert Anderson. After an introduction of 99 bars, suggestive of daybreak over streams, rivers and woods, the theme itself is announced in bar 100 by the English horn. Listeners hearing it for the first time may be startled by its resemblance to the opening measures of Verdi’s Rigoletto Quartet. Seven groups of variations follow. They are very free and linked without breaks. The theme or a variant is easily discerned at the beginning of each, and the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth groups finish with short, wordless passages by the tenors and basses of the chorus.

For the technically interested, the groups start as follows: No. 1, bar 115, Moderato sempre the clarinets and bassoons in variations of suspicious cheerfulness; No. 2, bar 143 Moderato the cellos begin a section of pastorale peace; No. 3, bar 261 Giocoso again the cellos but this time aggressive in a sort of awkward 4/4 dance; No. 4, bar 314 Lento molto tranquillo the horns introduce a passage of extreme but mysterious calm; No. 5, bar 375 Andante con grazia the strings play a graceful waltz variation in 6/8; No. 6, bar 416 Lento flutes, oboes, and clarinets introduce a passage of reflective tranquility; No. 7, bar 453 Allegro con moto a tumultuous outburst for the whole orchestra subsiding into an atmosphere of mystery and foreboding.

A sense of melancholy coupled with a pervasive pantheism is felt throughout the variations, and the attempts at gaiety have a sort of sadness and a purposeful naivete. The finale begins in bar 517 and concludes the work in bar 654. It is marked Marcia, Molto lento maestoso, and is more like a dirge than a march, forecasting the desolation of the conclusion. The full chorus finally enters unaccompanied:

After night has gone comes the day;

The dark shadows will fade away,

T’wards the morning lift a voice,

Let the scented woods rejoice,

And echoes swell across the mighty stream.


A short interlude follows, and the baritone with chorus finishes the song:

O Honey, I am going down the river in the

morning,

Heigh ho! heigh ho! down the mighty river.

O Honey I'll be gone

When next the whippoorwill’s a calling,

And don’t you be too lonesome,

And don’t you fret and cry,

For the dawn will soon be breaking,

The radiant morn is nigh;

And you'll find me ever awaiting,

Heigh ho! heigh ho!

T’wards the morning lift a voice,

Let the scented woods rejoice,

And echoes swell across the mighty stream.

The music swells to a climax and then in typical Delian fashion hauntingly fades away. It is a song of separation and heartbreak. The river of course is the Mississippi, one of the great symbols of suffering to the American Negro, and ‘going down’ was to be sold. The closing orchestral coda leaves no doubt that the parted lovers will never see each other again.

John Coveney

Angel Records (S-36756) 1971

[davidjared]

Wow; I'm among the first 20 people to find this delightful post. Thanks very much for sharing!

[eottoe]

@calefonxcalectric -- thanks for posting. Barbirolli and Beecham seem to be the only ones who understood Delius. The other conductors versions are not so good. I'm surprised there haven't been more people here to listen to this. Again, many thanks.