Masters

For years a gaunt Englishman has lain paralyzed in the village of Grez-sur-Loing, France, unable to go among men and hear them praise his music as "greatest in England since Purcell [17th Cen-tury]" and even "ranking with the greatest of all time." He is Frederick Delius, onetime Florida orange-planter, onetime music teacher in Danville, Va. He wrote "Sea Drift" to Walt Whitman's words. He wrote "Mass of Life" and "Appalachia." Later he set Poet James Elroy Flecker's Hassan to music and the splendors of "The Golden Road to Samarkand" filled the Haymarket Theatre for months on end. Sometimes he hears great orchestras playing his music--over the radio. Mostly he lies lonely, stricken, and what is worse, neglected.

In England, importunate Sir Thomas Beecham, patron and paladin of liberal music, has been beseeching the Government to bestow upon Composer Delius the Order of Merit, highest civilian honor (already possessed by Composer Sir Edward Elgar). "Before it is too late," pleads Sir Thomas. But the Government has other things to think about.

Frederick Delius is 64. Despite his paralysis he has gone on composing, dictating note by note to his wife. Last week he was reported to have given up even that. He was now, said despatches, totally blind.

Simultaneous with this news, celebrations reached their climax for the centenary of the death of a music master whose affliction was even greater, for a musician, than blindness. Ludwig van Beethoven was bodily sound but became stone deaf. As his hearing dwindled, his conducting, which he would not give up, became more and more ludicrous. He would bend over his keys to hear what he played until his orchestra quite lost sight of him. At the crescendoes he could and would straighten up, crouch up, stand up, finally leap up off the floor itself in passionate release.