Delius, In a Summer Garden

Frederick Delius (1862-1934) absorbed musical influences across Europe and America before turning seriously to composing. Born in Yorkshire to German parents, his early career in his father’s business took him to posts in Germany, Sweden, France, and Florida. Delius had no particular interest in business, and his father eventually agreed to support his musical education at the Leipzig Conservatory. Delius would then settle in Paris. He married the artist Jelka Rosen in 1903 and lived the remainder of his life just outside Paris in Grez-sur-Loing.

While in Leipzig, Delius befriended Edvard Grieg, who exerted a strong influence on Delius’s compositional style. But Delius could also draw on Wagner, French Impressionism, English and American folk songs, African influences, and the music popular in the Parisian cabarets.

Delius found his earliest success with performances in Germany. But he remained unknown, and with one not very notable exception, unperformed in his native England until 1907 when the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham became Delius’s primary champion. And it was at about this time that Delius produced some of his most enduring works: Briggs Fair (1907), In a Summer Garden (1908), Life’s Dance (1911), Summer Night on the River (1911) and On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring (1912).

The tone poem In a Summer Garden provides a good example of some of the techniques that set his music apart from others. It is described by Anthony Payne in Grove’s as having a harmonic style that combines a traditional vocabulary with a unique syntax. He discards traditional forms and instead builds a mosaic with short motifs. Payne concludes, “The whole structure shows Delius’s remarkable ability to prolong a sensuous moment by purely harmonic means without monotony and move elliptically into subtly contrasted areas.”

Many thought that Beecham’s death in 1961 would signal the end of Delius’s legacy, but the task has been taken up by others. There is a society and journal dedicated to the composer and an annual prize in his honor.