Delius: Composer, Lover, Enigma

Burials in Britain are not normally held after dark.

But nothing in the life and music

of the composer Frederick Delius was normal.

He was buried in May 1935, yet he'd actually died almost a year earlier.

The short ceremony took place at midnight in a Surrey churchyard,

yet Delius himself had nothing but contempt for the Church of England

and all religion.

And the village, Limpsfield, was a place Delius had never even visited.

He was a Northerner by birth,

but hadn't actually lived in Britain for 50 years.

It was supposed to be a secret burial,

but the press got wind of it,

and the next day's papers reported that,

"Delius was buried with owls hooting in an age-old yew tree."

This nocturnal assignation

was the final twist in the tale

of one of Britain's most mysterious composers.

Indeed, it's hard to know whether he was British at all.

For the last nine years of his life he'd been blind and paralysed,

and almost silent.

But in his glory days, he'd lived life to the full and beyond.

What is it about the music that speaks to you, then?

Its sensuality, no question about it.

It's passion. It's just aliveness.

Colourfulness, vitality

and sensuality.

There's always an underlying

eroticism in Delius.

I get the feeling that I'm floating, floating in space, almost.

And it's an airy kind of experience.

It's not earthbound.

It's up there, somewhere.

It's always been borne aloft.

Fritz Delius - that's how he was christened -

was the fourth of fourteen children.

His parents were devout Germans,

who'd recently settled in the Yorkshire town of Bradford,

home to the prosperous wool trade in the 1860s.

That, in his father's view, was Fritz's destiny.

But from an early age, Fritz was the despair of his father.

On Sunday, the whole family would go to church.

And Delius would abscond just as everyone was going into the church.

And his sister would then

have to rescue him at Sunday lunch

when his father would quiz Fritz,

in particular,

about the contents of the sermon

to see if he'd been paying attention.

Of course, young Fritz had been sitting outside

looking across the moors

thinking about nature and other matters of philosophy, perhaps.

But, sort of, shows early that church wasn't really his thing.

This student setting of the Ave Maria, in German,

was the only piece of religious music Delius ever wrote.

The sceptical writings of Friedrich Nietzsche were more to his taste.

The family wool business was in the district of Bradford

known, even today, as Little Germany.

The straight lines, ordered structures

and formal motifs of his childhood

were the exact opposite of everything that would unfold

in Fritz's life and music.

Various biographers have tried to piece together

the disjointed strands of Delius's early life.

Among them, the conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham,

his foremost champion.

We had a book by his sister,

devoted mostly to his childhood,

what sort of jam he liked for tea,

and what kind of rod he was beaten with by his parents

when he was a naughty boy.

That does little justice to his sister, Clare,

who published her book in 1935

against the wishes of the Delius circle.

She says that their father Julius had no interest in Fritz's music,

and almost succeeded in wrecking his career

and robbing the world of his genius.

She was writing the year after her brother's death,

and two years after Hitler had come to power in Germany.

"What Hitler is to Germany today," she said,

"so my father was to our family".

This iron disciplinarian required all his children

to spread their hands on the dining table before each meal,

so that he could inspect their finger nails.

Yet, he was generous with his money, and a keen patron of local music.

Delius grew up

in a very cultured, very Germanic, background,

where I suppose the three Bs

will have been worshipped -

Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.

I think, though, that it just stifled him in the end,

because there was this thing that, yes, you can like music,

you can appreciate it, you can learn the violin, learn the piano,

but you mustn't be a musician because really that's just not on.

Fritz, the wool trader, made several fairly fruitless expeditions

to Scandinavia, France and Germany.

So, instead, he persuaded his father

there was money in citrus fruit in Florida.

"Set me up in an orange plantation", he said, "and I'll manage it.

"Not much help to the family firm, admittedly,

"but at least I'll learn to be a businessman."

So, in 1884, at the age of 22,

Fritz Delius made his escape, and it changed his life.

He arrived in Jacksonville,

then I imagine he took a river steamer on south of here.

Then undoubtedly took a wagon of some kind, you know,

about four and a half miles on south to Solano Grove.

Jacksonville was a lively, cultured city,

but Delius's hundred-acre plantation

at Solano Grove was a remote spot

in the Florida swamp, prey to rattlesnakes and alligators -

a far cry from the Pennines he'd left behind.

And the house that he lived in

was only about 75ft or so away from the river itself.

It was a little cottage with four rooms and a detached kitchen.

Upstairs there was a sleeping loft.

So, all the breezes from the river would waft through the house,

you know, and keep Frederick and whoever else happened to be

with him, you know, comfortable.

Young Fritz was, by all accounts, a charmer.

Much later in life,

he told one or two friends that he'd fathered a child at Solano Grove.

It was quite likely, you know, I mean, my God,

we've got a 22-year-old young man here,

and he's out there in the woods

and randy as a billy goat

and so, he'll take whatever he finds.

The idea we have of him in his bath chair, paralysed,

doesn't tell you what he was like when he was younger.

A bit of a sportsman, played cricket at school and that sort of thing.

Got about the world.

A vigorous, physical kind of man,

He was a very handsome man, tall.

He has lots of...

female admirers.

Fritz was soon captivated by his exotic surroundings.

The sights, smells and, above all, sounds of Florida

were pleasures that lasted his whole life.

Commerce didn't stand a chance.

Right behind the cottage were orange groves.

That was a total flop.

You know, he was too interested in the music that he found here

and heard here.

And so the orange growing was a flop.

His main interest was not oranges or money or anything like that,

it was the singing of the black workers at the farm.

Delius would sit on the veranda of his orange plantation,

listening to the blacks down the river,

singing in an apparently improvisatory way,

coming from afar, floating on the evening breeze.

And he said he heard the most lovely harmony

and the most lovely tunes. He'd never heard anything like that.

In England he had visited and heard minstrel shows,

and so he was not totally ignorant of the music

of African Americans. He had already heard some.

But when he was here in this environment, a semi-tropical place,

enormous oaks, you know, magnolia trees,

it was totally different.

He was here where the music was being made and where it originated.

This was Florida only twenty years or so after the American Civil War.

Some of the men on his plantation

had started their working lives as slaves.

And the work songs and spirituals grew out of that environment.

He has this tune, # da-da di-da da-da dee daa dar. #

And when you play that in a European way, as you would,

# Da-da-da-da-da-da-dee-daa-daa. #

You've missed the point.

The whole idea with Delius

is that he heard it probably sung there at the plantation,

# La-da li-da di-da dei daa da. # like that.

And it should be played like that.

Many spirituals were mostly pentatonic.

You know, if you play all the black notes, that's a pentatonic scale.

You hear that in his music all the way to almost his very last works.

Every single Delius chord, you can hear black music-making,

you can hear

bluesy things, you can hear,

all this, sort of, joy and suffering at the same time,

which is dominating in Delius's music.

So, we have in the Florida Suite,

in the third movement we have a,

we have a slave song, we have with the,

# Dun dun dun dun dun duuun barabam

# Baram bam bam bum baaam baaam. #

We have a blue note here.

You think, my goodness, it reminds you a little bit of Gershwin

and that sort of thing.

I mean, Delius was the first big composer

to get that blues thing into his music,

and you can hear it all the time, from then on.

I think it's the first time in European music that we have a dance

which sounds like it's black people dancing.

It's very un-European.

The singing of black workers in Florida was Fritz's musical epiphany.

He asked a local church organist, to teach him

harmony and counterpoint.

Those lessons, he said,

were far more useful than anything he learned later.

After a year at Solano Grove,

he left the oranges to grow by themselves

and set off to earn his living

further north, in the town of Danville.

He was in Virginia,

when he taught the violin and the piano,

and instructed all the young ladies of the town

in the mysteries of music-making.

And possibly other things besides.

With the exception of that brief period, he never made any money.

He was kept by his father and his uncle.

His family barely knew where he was, or what he was up to.

They had no idea he wanted to turn the pleasures of Florida

into a piece of orchestral music.

By the time he wrote it down,

he'd moved back to Europe,

and enlisted as a music student in Leipzig.

There his Florida Suite caught the ear

of the famous Norwegian composer, Edvard Grieg.

Delius became his protege.

Because, at that time,

he hadn't heard any of his own music played by an orchestra,

he engaged a local band to play through his suite.

Grieg was there, and Delius apparently bribed,

or not bribed,

but the payment for this performance,

because he had no money as a student, was a barrel of beer.

I can certainly see why that piece, especially,

would have appealed to Grieg

because there's something

relatively simple about

its structure

and, at the same time, it's very songful,

and also it's incredibly evocative, cos I think something

that the two composers really had in common

was this ability to paint a picture.

The next time Grieg was in London,

he invited Fritz's father to lunch, and pleaded with him,

to keep funding Fritz's musical career, despite his misgivings.

Grieg took a tremendous liking to this young man

who had already visited Norway and knew it quite well.

And he became almost a musical father to him.

He put in a good word for Delius

at the right moment,

and Delius senior was quite impressed.

So, Delius Senior was won over,

in the fond hope that with a proper training,

his son could return to America and earn a decent wage as a teacher.

Fritz, however, had different ideas.

For a man like Delius, Paris was a fantastic place.

When he was really feeling his oats,

if you like,

he wanted to enjoy life,

he wanted to celebrate life

and find his own path.

He threw himself into, not only music, but all aspects of art.

He knew painters, he knew writers, he knew philosophers.

A real melting pot of culture.

In Paris Delius had the space to find his own voice.

His themes feel as contemporary today as they were a century ago.

Lovely melody on the violas,

the first loneliness of a big city ever written in music.

He wrote his great Nocturne about the nightlife of Paris.

And it's about what happens of an evening, through the night,

Montmartre, Pigalle, that sort of area, that he knew so well.

I don't think it's ever played in Paris, which,

which is in a way strange because it's such a flashy

and very flamboyant piece.

The music builds up and up, more impassioned.

And it changes, doesn't it, into a vivid,

outdoors sort of tread.

But then the pulse changes. The music dances.

The Bohemian life perhaps.

What he wants to describe, is the energy, the human contact,

the sense of devil-may-care.

Some of it, I would say, is raucous,

in fact I've often encouraged orchestras

to go further and make it seem more vulgar,

which is not a quality that normally you associate

with a composer of On Hearing The First Cuckoo In Spring.

I have discovered the music by Delius when I was 20,

and Delius became

a kind of secret garden in my life.

I have become an extremely passionate Delian,

really, in the last even five years.

And I'm incredibly excited about it.

I bought this green LP of Barbirolli conducting

In A Summer Garden

and several other pieces.

And I totally fell in love with that.

It's love at first sight.

There's nobody else like it.

Actually felt, when I listened to it,

that it was almost as if I had composed it myself.

He draws you into a magic world by use of very rich chords

in extraordinary sequences.

That sense of the idyllic

in Delius's music,

the way that it just seems to hold time still.

And that, for me, as a young musician,

was something really magical and enchanting.

It is the music of nature,

it is the music of love,

of life, which is both very subtle and very simple.

1890s Paris was full of musical life,

and Delius knew composers such as Faure, Messager, and Ravel.

But he spent more time in the company of painters

and writers, often sitting in

Mere Charlotte's Cremerie at number 13 Rue de la Grande Chaumiere

in Montparnasse.

All the artists were storming to Paris.

So, he wanted to be right in the eye of the cyclone,

having all these close friends

like Strindberg, who came down from Sweden, of course,

and Gauguin, the painter and Edvard Munch,

the Norwegian painter.

He was more in touch with

what was going on in the world

of painters and artists

and writers than musicians.

For Fritz, the decade in Paris was the making of him -

and eventually, the breaking of him.

Delius was, in French we say, "bon vivant".

It is in his music, he celebrates the woman,

he celebrates the trees, he celebrates the water.

So, he celebrates nature in all his forms.

He had many things in common with Gauguin and, particularly,

the passion for women.

And he shared a passion for exotic women.

You know he owned, he bought the famous picture, Nevermore.

He bought that from Gauguin himself, and...

Why, do you think?

I think he loved it.

It's one, one gorgeous naked girl

from Tahiti lying there,

he would have adored that picture.

Nevermore represents the sexual appeal.

In these years, Delius has numerous sexual activity.

And so this picture represents the numerous adventures

he had in Paris.

It's like Debussy.

Maybe that's the modernist idea of his time.

You know, I think Debussy's religion

is late hours in the morning

with his girlfriend in bed.

Metaphysical anxiety about age and death, all that,

to be resolved in the late morning in bed with his lover.

And I feel this sensuality,

I feel this longing and this lust

for life in Delius' music,

that's why I'm attracted to it, I have to admit.

But there's nothing facile about it.

Nothing for the pure enjoyment.

It's something profound.

The evidence for Delius's compulsive interest in pleasure

comes from his friend,

the Australian composer, Percy Grainger.

Delius, he said, "was a sex-worshipper,

"and practised immorality with puritanical stubbornness."

In a letter to a biographer of Delius,

several years after his death,

Grainger, who was no sex-slouch himself,

said, "Delius was never lewd about sex.

"He never joked about it in my hearing.

"He worshipped sex, and practised it as part of a cultured

"and yea-some life."

"'I am a bejahender Natur',

"Delius was always saying." Meaning a man who by nature always says yes.

He wanted to enjoy life extremely,

by trekkings in his beloved mountains, in Norway,

by extremely nice and refined food and wine.

Of course, he was a great amateur of women,

and in that, perhaps, was not careful enough,

if we referred to the sad disease, who darkened his last years.

But all in his life shows that always he,

he pursued the pleasure, first of all.

With his "puritanical stubbornness", Delius responded

without inhibition to Ernest Dowson's florid poetry in Songs of Sunset.

The cycle opens with a choral movement, which is soft.

And then suddenly we have this eruption

in the second song of two singers -

a man and a woman singing about love and sex.

That's what it's about.

Very melancholic, very elegiac pieces.

It's always lovers who are thinking back on,

"Oh, it was wonderful then."

All the agony and the pain that you had afterwards.

An almost completely unknown piece by Delius,

and, for me, incomprehensible why.

The work's sense of rapture paralysed in death,

was an uncanny foretaste of his own fate.

Indeed, its original title was Songs of Twilight and Sadness.

In 1895, at the age of 33,

Fritz was diagnosed

with the ultimately fatal disease of syphilis -

the plague of the artistic world at that time.

Soon afterwards, he felt the urge to go back to Florida.

His pretext was that, after ten years of neglect,

he needed to sort out the oranges.

He crossed the Atlantic with a violinist friend,

Halfdan Jebe, who shared his taste in exotic women.

But the real purpose of his three-month trip

may have been to trace the child he'd fathered twelve years before,

with the woman he described to Percy Grainger more than once

as his Negro mistress in Florida.

If so, he never found them.

But his renewed interest in the pleasures of the American South

bore fruit in his opera Koanga,

which sometimes sounds like a film score,

thirty years before such a thing had been invented.

He was actually the first one in the European music tradition to,

to write a black opera.

I mean it's about 25 years before Porgy And Bess, I think.

He needs to go to remote places to find his own creative voice.

And I think he's the first composer to explore that new world of sounds

and of instrumental colours.

And he does it through his American operas.

He wanted to embrace the world,

and he make no difference

between the races.

In this respect, I think he is

a very visionary man.

He'd already written an opera about the Indian population

set in the Florida Everglades.

He called the hero Solano,

after his own tropical home at Solano Grove.

In this next opera, an African prince, Koanga,

comes in chains to the American plantations as a resentful slave,

where he will fall in love with a local girl, Palmyra.

This dance which is in it, La Calinda,

which is famous as a single piece,

but Palmyra is singing on top of that in the opera.

There's a wonderful moment

when she embellishes this dance with a lovely tune on top of it.

Delius even wrote a part for banjos -

their first appearance in a European classical score -

an instrument he'd heard in minstrel shows as a boy.

Koanga was an early work,

but it opened the door for the pieces of his maturity.

By his late thirties, Fritz's knowledge of the orchestra

was still largely dependent on concerts he'd been to.

He'd never played in an orchestra himself,

and he'd heard little of his own music professionally performed.

So, in May 1899, he splashed out

and put on a four-hour Delius concert in London,

in Piccadilly, with selections from Koanga as the finale.

It nearly bankrupted him, but it was a revelation.

He went out and actually bought himself a hall, St James's.

And I think that's the first promotional job

he'd done for himself, it's extraordinary.

I don't know how people got to hear about him.

He heard these works for the first time.

It was an incredible experience for, for him, I think.

The morning papers carried reviews.

His music was seen as controversial.

Indeed one of the solo singers had put his fingers in his ears

to try to blot out the outlandish noises coming from the orchestra.

In Bradford, Julius Delius, now 77,

read his copy of The Times from front to back, put it down,

and ate his breakfast in silence,

with his daughters watching anxiously.

"I see Fritz has given a concert", was all he eventually said.

No, with one exception,

no large work of his

had ever been heard by him.

His music for him was music on paper.

This concert was, as I'd said, was a revelation.

He heard his own music.

It's a difficulty, actually,

not hearing your music performed.

It's very, very different.

Some people think that

when you write a piece down, on the page,

there is the music in your head,

and you've put it down on the page,

so the, the job is done, and when you hear it, it will be like that.

But that's psychologically so wrong.

There's something very different about the actual physical thing

of the music hitting your eardrum.

It was just Delius's luck that three weeks later, in the same hall,

another composer took London by storm.

Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations were heard for the first time.

It was Elgar's first big concert in the capital

and he never looked back.

The Delius event was forgotten,

and he wasn't played again in Britain for another eight years.

But Delius himself never forgot it.

His own music had hit his eardrums,

and it gave him the confidence to keep developing

his distinctive sound-world.

He was a supreme egotist

and only interested in what his vision demanded,

and he was determined to get it right.

And from that point of view, a sort of totally honest

and true composer, but not the orchestra's friend, absolutely not.

The Enigma Variations, a great English masterpiece,

goes directly to you, as you listen to it.

With Delius, unless you're prepared to give it a bit of time

and to listen to something more than once,

and to spend time with it, of course, it will escape you.

Elgar viewed the orchestra as his friends who were doing him

a great service in playing his music, and he was determined to give

every player at least one or two things to do which they would enjoy.

He felt like he had a contract between him and the orchestra.

I don't think Delius had any such emotion.

For Delius, the test was not to follow a musical argument

or devise a fugue.

He'd always lived for the pleasure of the moment,

so now, with a death sentence hanging over him,

he set out to conjure up the most beautiful sounds he could -

especially through his choice of harmony.

He took the moments of intense pleasure in his life,

the swamps of Florida, the high hills of Norway, the Yorkshire Moors,

the fleshpots of Paris, the slave songs of America,

or the canvasses of his artist friends,

and transformed them into music.

Some people, it puts them off.

They just cannot take it all at once, you know,

this fantastic harmony where every single chord change is an adventure.

It's a very, very rich style.

A lot of people find it too rich, you know,

it's like a very, very rich meal that never lets up,

and you have to have a strong stomach for it.

He had such a huge variety of

emotional temperature in his music.

I mean, think, for instance,

of the opening of the Mass of Life,

not a religious work...

..not a Pagan work, but a work about the exuberance of life

and man's bond with nature,

inspired by Nietzsche, of course.

It opens with a terrific orchestral

and choral explosion of energy, that blows you out of your seat.

It's so virile!

People don't associate that with Delius, but it's always there.

There is a strong hatred against the Christian religion

and all of the religions, I think.

He believed only in life.

In the Requiem he wrote, he has a double choir passage,

where one choir sings

# Hallelujah hallelujah hallelujah. #

and the other one sings # Allah il, heil, Allah Allah. #

And he has these Muslims and Christians

screaming towards each other.

Delius was, of course, an atheist, but I think his religion

was in the mountains,

it was in the hills,

the forests.

Life, here, that's it, but nature just goes on and on.

Nowhere did he feel that more

than in the mountains of Norway,

which he'd first fallen in love with

on a business trip for his father.

He often spent summer holidays there, for the rest of his active life.

There's something quite anguished about this whole beginning.

It's a feeling of man's need.

There's some longing in this music.

And it completely gives the lie to the idea that

Delius is all about, you know gentle, pretty landscapes.

It's not.

It's a very urgent, kind of passionate music.

We're looking for something higher. It's an aspiration, in a way.

And the music begins to wind up

with growing chromatic tension.

And a sense of physical strain or exertion.

Sorry, I keep listening to the music, it's terrible,

I lose my train of thought!

Then there's this sudden breakthrough, and the clouds part.

And we hear this repeated horn figure,

a Norwegian herding call or kulokk.

And we're in a completely different place.

In October 1901, the prodigal son

was called back to Bradford for his father's funeral.

Julius had died at the age of 80,

without ever having heard a note of his son's music.

"We buried the old man on Monday", Fritz wrote,

"and, indeed, he died just in time to save the whole family from ruin."

The wool business was failing,

and Delius's hopes of a substantial legacy came to nothing.

At this point, at the age of 40, he changed his name to Frederick.

For the first time in his life he was alone.

He'd no-one to look to.

His father was gone, his uncle was gone, there was nothing.

And that was the turning point in his life.

Back in France, Delius was spending more and more time

at the home of an artist friend, Jelka Rosen.

The village of Grez-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau,

gave him the tranquil space he needed for composing,

and Jelka, who had a little money, provided for his material needs.

How do you interpret his relationship with Jelka?

A very satisfactory one from his point of view,

is the way I put it.

Poor old Jelka.

She adored his art, she adored his music.

And she understood that he had a unique contribution

to give to the world.

And she was sacrificing herself,

not only herself, but also her own art.

He found someone who obviously adored him,

who had a house where he could live and compose in,

and would look after him.

And he went on having affairs with women in Paris all the time.

There's one note at the bottom of the score.

It just says, "Sing on vowel uh, UH, (as in love)...

"..with very loose mouth,

"almost closed in the pianissimo, but which should be gradually

"opened or shut according as more or less tone is wanted."

I think it's very interesting that he chose the word love.

There's other words which have that vowel sound.

But the one thing that is not in the title is romance,

but I think this is an incredibly romantic,

and perhaps even erotic, piece.

Is he an English composer?

No! In...

Yeah, but what do you mean by that?

Delius is an English composer, I will say that without hesitation.

To call him an English composer is entirely wrong.

Well, I actually truly believe he is English.

Yes, he is an English composer, because he was born in Bradford.

If you'd asked him if he was English, he might have got cross.

He had not a single drop of British blood.

His blood in his veins is German.

His heart is in the highlands of Norway.

He's an incredible Norwegian composer,

more Norwegian than any Norwegian I know.

Part of his soul, he's, he has a little, he's a little bit French.

And in other works,

like in On Hearing The First Cuckoo In Spring, he's very English.

But, the first cuckoo in spring can be heard in France,

just as much as it can be in Yorkshire.

What I find that Delius is most like is film,

and this is really bizarre

because there weren't any films, really, in 1912.

But this opening, the way that he treats it, you never hear it again.

Here it is you have that lovely sound and then you have this...

And you never hear any of that material again.

And what that's like is like a long shot of a wood.

It's tempting to try and persuade oneself that

that's the sound of a particularly English spring.

But of course, Delius wrote the piece in France,

and it's based partly on a Norwegian folk song,

which was suggested to Delius by an Australian pianist.

Percy Grainger, when he first met Delius in 1907,

played him Grieg's arrangement of the little melody In Ola Valley.

And I love the fact that,

as well as having Grainger suggest the tune to him,

Delius has had the cuckoo suggested to him by Grieg's arrangement.

So, this next section is when you get down in the wood

and you start looking around, until suddenly, we see the cuckoo.

On two occasions Delius writes "cuckoo"

in a word above the clarinet part. "Cuckoo."

And so this implies a very filmic imagination, to me,

that we've gone from that long shot...

And down to...

..that, and to the details of the tune.

And finally, we get to what the film's all about,

which is the cuckoo.

Fred and Jelka finally got married in 1903.

He told Grieg it was more practical,

it gave them a badge of honesty and good manners,

and they got everything cheaper.

Their six-year courtship had been at best lukewarm.

Did he ever love her?

It's difficult to say, to say, to say that,

because, erm,

in his first letters he writes, "Yours, Frederick".

I don't know if he really writes,

"I love you", to her.

By the time that they met, Delius was aware that he had syphilis,

and what the consequences would be for Jelka

if they were to consummate their relationship.

And one possible conclusion is that

that relationship was never

fully consummated.

After he had got married with Jelka,

he had not lost his bad habit

of going to Paris with friends, and looking after women.

Jelka complained, to judge by Delius's words of self-defence.

"I am not affectionate," he told her in January 1901.

But he said he couldn't change.

"Please follow me through your friendship's eyes,

"where I am always to be found.

"Through love's eyes, no doubt, I become hazy and indistinct."

The fact that he worked so well in her home spoke for itself, he said.

"When I suddenly wake up to the fact

"that you are suffering a sort of hell,

"then only have I ever thought of leaving."

He maintains his old relations with some prostitutes, perhaps,

he was, I don't know, how do you say in English, a libertin, uh?

-Libertine.

-Libertine.

Yes, he was a libertine man.

"Am I going to the devil or not?", he asked Jelka.

"I don't know but I must go after my art

"and I know you understand it and want it so."

So, what sort of husband was he for her?

Ruthless.

Pursuing his own interests.

And demanding of her that she was just at his feet all the time.

The young man who'd conducted Delius's big concert in London

went to stay with the Deliuses.

He reported that the composer had taken him to six brothels

in Paris, and introduced him to various friends working in them.

"Is Delius quite sane in these matters?" He asked.

Do you think he was a hedonist?

That's to say the least.

You could say hedonistic.

You could say it's certainly luxuriant music.

And it has a sense of its own beauty.

He's not beating around the bush at all,

like many other English composers!

He's going directly to the matter. What's life all about?

How is it?

"Birth, copulation and death",

"Birth, copulation and death",

and over and over again, that is actually a very, very Delian thing.

This feeling that you can't let anything slip from your grasp,

you know, you, you have to seize the beauty of the,

of the moment when you find it.

When you get to a composer like Stockhausen,

who invents this idea of moment form,

which is that every single moment is itself so dazzling

and ear-catching,

that you can put them down in any order and they'll make sense

because you're always interested in the music,

you're not interested in where it's going,

you're interested in what you're hearing now.

It is this idea of the moment being so powerful with Delius.

You're fascinated by what he's saying all the time.

This sense of huge, temporal space,

as though the music's not moving, at all,

with the offstage horn echo.

And it could almost be a Mahler alpine meadow,

but it's even more static and intensely-felt, somehow.

And the string chords in the background are like a sort of aura

or glow of sound. They're more noise than...than actual music.

The only other composer I can think of that has the same kind of thing,

is Messiaen, which is music

that doesn't move. I mean, it's, you know,

it's not directional, it's... it sits there and is beautiful,

and you have to be able to accept that. You can't say,

"Yes, but where is it going?",

because it, you know,

there are moments in Delius

where it isn't going anywhere,

it's just sitting there for you to love.

It's also a feeling for register or texture.

The way that he writes for particular instruments,

such as the strings,

you get this sense of a kind of tingling in your ears,

the noise or static charge around the actual string sound itself.

Time just seems to stand still.

It's only two pages of score...

..but it lasts almost five minutes in performance.

And we simply have this sense of drift.

You need to find the shadows.

It can't all be bright day, or darkest night.

You need to find the grey between the black and the white.

If you have the time,

those shadows will come,

where the light breaks through.

When Delius was away in Paris, Jelka in Grez-sur-Loing

was at least free to paint.

And more and more, Delius came to value

her riverside home as a place to work.

If the 1890s were the years

when his musical personality germinated,

the first decade of the 20th century

was when it came into full bloom.

Yet he has never quite caught up with the other composers

who crowded that decade -

Debussy, Ravel, Mahler, Richard Strauss, Sibelius and Elgar.

Where do you think Delius's music fits?

In a way,

I don't want it to fit, at all.

Because, to me,

nobody else achieved

that sense of ecstasy.

You can say that he took his leads from, from Wagner

and from Grieg and Chopin, actually, also.

But he turned it into his own language right away.

He is a one-off.

When he's writing in a mature style,

there is no-one else

who sounds like Delius.

It's very hard to conduct.

It's very hard to get an orchestra to understand

what it needs to do and to listen for,

to make the sound-world.

I know in the UK

there's a tendency to say

that orchestral players

they hate playing Delius,

and they find it dreary

and blah, blah, blah.

I don't know why this has occurred, but here, it's not the case.

I think the wind players would be more interested,

they get lovely little chirrups,

and more detailed stuff to do.

It needs great nuance, that's the thing.

Subtle differences

of which note is important, where to linger,

perhaps just one note is a bit longer than the next four.

That's very, very difficult to write down.

It's that feeling for detail

that makes Delius's music so unique,

and the use of chromaticism

that gives you that sense of

the tiniest thing moving in the garden.

The vision is so evocative. I mean, you could see it!

You could see, sort of, late blossoming roses,

at least I can.

The great ability of Delius is to describe

and to give the feeling in the same time.

He describes the flowers. He describes the butterflies.

We have the bees, zzzz, in his music.

Jelka made this garden in France.

Everyone who came into their garden

said it was the most magical garden they could think of.

Everything was orderly and wild at the same time.

The moment you get into the garden, emotion takes over.

With Delius, it always starts being pictorial,

but it gets emotional and it turns into love and eroticism.

He writes his score like a painter, with the pointillist technique.

He puts a little motif here

and little motif here and here

and there and every time in another

combination of instruments.

And at the end of the garden, there was this river.

It was very, very romantic, and they had these trees

with the leaves going down into the stream, and all that.

The large melody of the river in the strings

with the arabesque of woodwind figuring the song of a thrush.

It's a wonderful kind of French description

of this French river flowing,

but suddenly, the river takes on what is really a running river.

It's a deeply sensual thing that you're experiencing.

This passage is, for me, one of the most beautiful passage in music.

-All music?

-Of all music, yes.

During his years in Grez-sur-Loing,

Delius started paying the price of his pleasures.

There was no certain way of knowing how the critical, tertiary stage

of syphilis would strike, but in 1909, he developed mobility problems,

and later travelled all over Europe in frantic search of a cure.

What that must do to you, to know that your days are numbered,

and wondering when it's going to happen...

It must really focus your creative efforts.

His nature changed. Perhaps the syphilis that was going to,

in the end, turn him blind, hardened him in some way,

or changed his constitution.

And he became very critical, didn't he?

He was quite a difficult man to live with, I think,

and there were very few pieces of music

that he was prepared to listen to, at all.

It was the paradox of the man that his search for pleasure

had always been coupled with an almost Puritan work ethic.

So, as the disease caught up with him,

he kept on writing - spurred on perhaps by his new champion,

the young British conductor, Thomas Beecham.

Delius's music became his personal crusade.

Sir Thomas Beecham was an incredible pioneer,

in trying to bring this music to a public,

not to a wider public, just to a public at all.

He took the responsibility for shaping it a little bit

and saying,

"Start quietly there and make sure you're loud by here."

Because the music was, by contemporary standards,

was sketchily written down.

The years Delius had been writing music in isolation had,

in some ways, made him

his own worst enemy.

He was not used to putting his scores in front of musicians,

with the players bombarding you with questions -

"Is it still forte in bar four?", and all that kind of thing.

If he'd had that experience more often early on,

he might have been keener to put, put markings in.

Sometimes, it's not clear, whether he means you to play it very smoothly,

or whether to gently articulate it.

Whether the strings play lots of notes in one bow,

or whether they make a different bow for every note.

He had this sound in his head, and

he wrote down the notes but, as we know,

he was a terrible conductor,

according to Beecham, at any rate.

Well, I have seen in my time good conductors, not so good,

competent conductors, indifferent conductors,

but I have never come across such an abysmal depth of ineptitude

in the way of conducting as revealed by poor old Frederick!

It was quite a common thing for him to beat five in the bar,

when it was four.

He beat it 1, 2, 3, 4, AND 1, 2, 3, 4,

which turned it into 5.

But there was a time when he used to practice many hours a day

in front of a mirror,

yeah, endeavouring to understand this mysterious craft.

-Yes. But to no purpose?

-No purpose at all.

All Beecham's little hairpins and,

and little technical things,

they are all in the complete edition.

Whether this is right or wrong,

I shan't be the one to say,

but it's characteristic of the total dominance

of Beecham in the connection with Delius.

-You discussed his scores with Delius?

-Oh, never!

-Oh, never?

-Oh, good God, no! Of course I wouldn't.

He couldn't tell me anything about them.

When I played them, and he heard them in the concert room

or on the radio, he said,

"That's the way I want it.

-"Don't change that. That's, that's, that's grand!"

-Mm.

Recently, in Manchester,

we were doing one of his

greatest works, Sea Drift.

And Beecham had made some very decisive

ideas about the effect of the sea...

..where we would get louder and softer and everything.

And then my assistant produced the original score,

that was first published, and it didn't have these marks at all.

Delius himself made no such swells.

And I thought, if we just did what Delius wrote,

what would it sound like?

And I thought it was so beautiful, and so much more evocative,

that immediately, at the second rehearsal, I said,

"Right, scrub out everything that Beecham wrote

"and let's start again, with a clearer, cleaner palette."

And the gentle swell of the sea was there,

but the waves weren't so big.

The light on the water seemed to me to be more interesting,

like the sunshine on an early summer morning.

And it seemed to me that that's what

Delius had given us.

But that's not to say that Beecham was wrong.

He had made a choice and I was going to make another choice.

In the early 1920s, Delius lost the use of his hands.

His music manuscripts lay unfinished on the table,

and he was running out of money.

He had to sell his beloved Gauguin painting,

and settle for a copy painted by Jelka in its place.

The next thing to go was his sight -

the start of nine years of blindness -

a cruel fate for someone so visually aware.

This is the passage that gave Delius so much trouble,

just to get all the voicing right.

And then a solo soprano and a tenor,

something that would have come very much from,

from what he heard in Florida.

It's as though Delius needed some other instrument,

and that instrument he needed was the voice.

He needs it, he needs this new colour,

and, and this pure way of expressing human wonder.

And now the orchestra sort of becomes part of the chorus...

..rather then the other way round, you know it's, it's...

..I mean, it's glorious high notes for the sopranos.

You can feel yourself looking up, and...

..in ecstasy, really.

The overwhelming beauty and grandeur and glory of, of...

..of the high hills, it's... I just find it completely overwhelming.

And then we come back to the... the music of the opening.

Delius himself came back one more time to where he began - to England.

In 1929, he spent three weeks in London

for a six-concert festival of his music, organized by Beecham.

Otherwise, he was a prisoner in Grez-sur-Loing.

But after several years of silence,

he did manage to complete some scores,

with the aid of a young organist from Yorkshire, Eric Fenby,

who soon realized that Delius's ear and tongue were still sharp.

I think probably most people were terrified of him

when they went to Grez, even though they were friends,

I think he was a sort of friend where you,

you had to be very careful what you said the whole time,

sit on the edge of your seat, almost.

He told Fenby that no artist should ever marry.

"Amuse yourself with as many women as you like", he said.

"If you do have to marry,

"choose a girl who is more in love with your art than with you."

At the end of his life, Delius's nationality became a burning issue.

Today, his Bradford origins prompt only cursory attention.

But when he died in France at the age of 72,

there was a tussle over his body that was quite macabre.

The strategy that was adopted with Delius was to make him

English in a way that he himself had never bothered with.

It's very interesting to see the obituaries of the composers

who died in 1934

as the year progresses.

Elgar was the first, and he was much lamented, in February.

And then rather a surprise, Gustav Holst died in May.

And then Delius died in June, and he was front page news.

You know, "The greatest composer in England since Purcell",

and that, of course, was a phrase

that had been applied to Elgar in February,

which they just lifted absolutely and said

"No," you know, "Our man is the man".

Delius and Elgar had been almost the same age,

both late developers, both peaking at the same point -

the first decade of the twentieth century.

For many years afterwards,

their partisans were in open rivalry.

No-one could serve two masters -

you had to choose between God and Mammon,

or Elgar and Delius.

Beecham had certainly made his choice.

He almost never conducted Elgar.

He re-claimed Delius for Britain, after his long exile.

Beecham put it about that, on his last journey back to France,

the blind composer had wanted his deckchair

on the Channel ferry turned to face the receding shores of England.

And he persuaded the dying Jelka that Delius had always wanted

to be buried in the south of England,

where Beecham just happened to have a connection

with St Peter's church in Limpsfield.

This management of Delius's nationality went on,

even after his death,

because, in fact, his remains were Anglicised, even.

They were taken out of the grave where they'd been put

with very scant ceremony in France in June 1934,

and in May 1935, he was reburied in Limpsfield in Surrey.

This feat of bodysnatching for Britain

was so controversial that it required a midnight burial.

And the next day, Sir Thomas Beecham came down

with the London Philharmonic Orchestra

and played some of Delius's music and made a speech.

And the BBC recorded that speech and broadcast it.

So the press management,

the media management that was going on here was absolutely fantastic.

None of this happened when Elgar died.

Yet Delius and Elgar

ended the best of friends.

In 1933, the year before they both died, Elgar flew to France

and visited the blind and paralysed Delius, for tea,

ham sandwiches and champagne.

This is a remarkable event in British musical history, I think.

The meeting between these two grand old men of British music,

sharing their experience,

and also their sense of times having moved on, somehow.

But then more touching, I think, is the correspondence

that follows afterwards.

Elgar and Delius wrote six letters to each other

over the next six months -

the last from Elgar's nursing home on Christmas Day 1933,

two months before his death.

This late encounter was unblemished by jealousy or bitterness.

You can see that they got on extremely well.

Very warm hearted and friendly.

And they both admired what each other had done,

contrary to popular belief.

Elgar called Delius a poet in sound.

He said the aeroplane journey to Paris had been like Delius's music.

A little intangible, sometimes, but always very beautiful.

This is a composer who speaks to me entirely.

It gets my soul and my nerves going.

It affects me deeply.

I find a lot of his music intensely moving.

It makes me cry.

I think you have a very, for me, life changing experience.

It's never going to be mainstream.

I don't think it was important for him.

Delius is Delius, and he will always just be that very special chapter.

An extraordinary sense of beauty of sound,

which has not been surpassed

by any composer dead or alive in the world.

He is not very much played.

But his music is a very peculiar kingdom.

He writes in the Requiem - and the text he has written himself -

"Take to yourself a woman,

"and drink and eat, and enjoy life."

I think that's essentially what Delius thinks life is for.

It's here for you! Take it!

The day after the Limpsfield funeral,

which Jelka had been too weak to attend,

the phone rang on engineer David Howarth's desk at the BBC.

From the distinctive three rings,

he knew it was the Director-General, Sir John Reith.

"Take your recording of the funeral to Kensington, young man",

he said, "and let Mrs Delius hear it in her nursing home".

He played Jelka Beecham's eulogy.

"Dear Tommy", she murmured with a smile,

but as he played her In A Summer Garden, she began to drift away.

Jelka never heard any more music and died the next day.

Only years later did the BBC man discover that the piece he'd chosen

was the one Delius had dedicated to Jelka,

and the last music Delius himself had heard.

In death, at least, Fred and Jelka were united.

"All are my blooms", it says on the score,

"and all sweet blooms of love to thee I gave while Spring and Summer sang."

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