Posthumous Mass

When white-haired, British-born Frederick Delius died in 1934 after twelve years of paralysis and nine of total blindness, he was still one of the least appreciated of eminent modern composers. Though his works had been performed off & on in Germany, the French, among whom he spent his most productive years, had ignored him. In 1899 Delius himself arranged a concert in London; in 1929 Sir Thomas Beecham had organized a six-day Delius Festival, which the composer attended in a wheel chair. But his opera, Koanga, had waited more than 35 years for its British premiere. His masterpieces, the Mass of Life and the opera, A Village Romeo and Juliet, had received only a half-dozen hearings, none at all outside Central Europe and London.

In U. S. concert halls Delius' music was always more talked about than heard. Even those U. S. concertgoers who knew something of his work thought of him primarily as an Impressionist composer of small-scale, poetic pieces for orchestra, a sort of minor Ravel. Last week, Manhattan music-lovers were jolted into rating Delius many notches higher. His 33-year-old Mass of Life, given a belated U. S. premiere by Conductor Hugh Ross and the Schola Cantorum, proved the outstanding event of the concert season so far, revealed its composer in a new and very different light. No impressionist miniature, the Mass of Life required the booming efforts of a gigantic chorus, four solo singers and a full symphony orchestra, moved tellingly from climax to climax, invited comparison with musical epics of such romantic symphonists as Brahms and Bruckner.

Like his contemporaries, Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler (Symphony No. 1), Delius went to Friedrich Nietzsche's ode to the superman,Thus Spake Zarathustra, for inspiration, converted portions of its Biblical German oratory into choruses and vocal solos, illustrated its moods with a surging orchestral undercurrent. His Nietzschean Mass, which requires over an hour and a half to perform, is so perfectly formed and climaxed that the listener's interest never lags--a pretty sure sign, in a pieqe of that size, that a great musical mind has been at work.

As a boy, Delius had been trained to enter the prosperous wool business of his cantankerous Prussian father in Bradford, England. But early practice on the violin and piano gave him different ideas. In 1884, at the age of 22, he persuaded his family to send him to Florida, where he took charge of a solitary orange plantation on the St. John's River. Instead of raising oranges he listened to the singing of the Negroes, devoured books on musical theory, struck up an acquaintance with a Jacksonville organist, Thomas F. Ward, who taught him the rudiments of composition. Here also he came across the Creole stories of George W. Cable, and was so impressed by the episode of the Negro chieftain, Bras-Coupe, in The Grandissimes that he later based an opera (Koanga) on it. Leaving the Florida plantation, "Fritz" Delius (as he was then known) worked successively as a singer in a Jacksonville synagogue, as a music teacher in Danville, Va., as an organist in Manhattan, returned subsequently to Europe, where he studied at the Leipzig Conservatory. A trip to Norway brought about his meeting famed Composer Edvard Grieg (Peer Gynt Suite) who encouraged him, and was instrumental in reconciling Delius' father to his son's musical ambitions. In 1888, with financial assistance from a wealthy uncle, Delius settled in Paris. Except for a few trips (one of which took him all the way to Florida again--some say, in a fruitless search for a Negro sweetheart he had left behind him), he spent the rest of his life in Paris, or in the nearby village of Grez-sur-Loing, where he owned a secluded villa.

All of Delius' compositions are individual in style.* Though his music sometimes resembles that of the French Impressionists, sometimes that of the German Romantics, it is always peculiarly his own. Of his work, pompous Composer Richard Strauss once said: "I never dreamed that anybody except myself was writing such music."

*Though performances of Delius' larger scores are still few & far between, the Mass of Life remains unrecorded, one of his monumental works, Sea Drift (words by Walt Whit-man), has been specially recorded by London's Delius Society (Columbia); other important compositions (Brigg Fair, Eventyr, Paris, On Hearing The First Cuckoo In Spring and excerpts from several of the operas) have been issued by Columbia and Victor.

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