59 Facts About Frederick Delius

Frederick Delius was sent to Florida in the United States in 1884 to manage an orange plantation.

Frederick Delius soon neglected his managerial duties and in 1886 returned to Europe.

Frederick Delius became paralysed and blind, but completed some late compositions between 1928 and 1932 with the aid of an amanuensis, Eric Fenby.

Frederick Delius's music has been only intermittently popular, and often subject to critical attacks.

The Frederick Delius Society, formed in 1962 by his more dedicated followers, continues to promote knowledge of the composer's life and works, and sponsors the annual Frederick Delius Prize competition for young musicians.

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Frederick Delius was baptised as Fritz Theodor Albert Delius, and used the forename Fritz until he was about 40.

Frederick Delius was the second of four sons born to Julius Delius and his wife Elise Pauline, nee Kronig.

Frederick Delius's parents were born in Bielefeld, Westphalia, and Julius's family had already lived for several generations in German lands near the Rhine but was originally Dutch.

Frederick Delius household was musical; famous musicians such as Joseph Joachim and Carlo Alfredo Piatti were guests, and played for the family.

The young Frederick Delius was first taught the violin by Rudolph Bauerkeller of the Halle Orchestra, and had more advanced studies under George Haddock of Leeds.

From 1874 to 1878, Frederick Delius was educated at Bradford Grammar School, where the singer John Coates was his slightly older contemporary.

Frederick Delius then attended the International College at Isleworth between 1878 and 1880.

Julius Frederick Delius assumed that his son would play a part in the family wool business, and for the next three years he tried hard to persuade him to do so.

Frederick Delius's father sent him to Sweden, where he again put his artistic interests ahead of commerce, coming under the influence of the Norwegian dramatists Henrik Ibsen and Gunnar Heiberg.

Frederick Delius was then sent to represent the firm in France, but he frequently absented himself from business for excursions to the French Riviera.

Frederick Delius was in Florida from the spring of 1884 to the autumn of 1885, living on a plantation at Solano Grove on the Saint Johns River, about 35 miles south of Jacksonville.

Frederick Delius continued to be engrossed in music, and in Jacksonville he met Thomas Ward, who became his teacher in counterpoint and composition.

Frederick Delius later said that Ward's teaching was the only useful music instruction he ever had.

Frederick Delius later liked to represent his house at Solano Grove as "a shanty", but it was a substantial cottage of four rooms, with plenty of space for Frederick Delius to entertain guests.

Frederick Delius paid little attention to the business of growing oranges, and continued to pursue his musical interests.

In 1886, Julius Frederick Delius finally agreed to allow his son to pursue a musical career, and paid for him to study music formally.

Frederick Delius left Danville and returned to Europe via New York, where he paused briefly to give a few lessons.

At the conservatoire, Frederick Delius made little progress in his piano studies under Carl Reinecke, but Salomon Jadassohn praised his hard work and grasp of counterpoint; Frederick Delius resumed studies under Hans Sitt.

Much more important to Frederick Delius's development was meeting the composer Edvard Grieg in Leipzig.

In 1897, Frederick Delius met the German artist Jelka Rosen, who later became his wife.

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Frederick Delius visited her there, and after a brief return visit to Florida, he moved in with her.

Frederick Delius gave the premiere at Elberfeld on 14 December 1901.

Beecham, who had until then heard not a note of Frederick Delius's music, expressed his "wonderment" and became a lifelong devotee of the composer's works.

The reviews were polite, but The Times, having praised the orchestral aspects of the score, commented, "Mr Frederick Delius seems to have remarkably little sense of dramatic writing for the voice".

Frederick Delius never gives concerts or makes propaganda for his music; he never conducts an orchestra, or plays an instrument in public.

In Germany, the regular presentation of Frederick Delius's works ceased at the outbreak of the war, and never resumed.

Frederick Delius had begun to show symptoms of syphilis that he had probably contracted in the 1880s.

Frederick Delius took treatment at clinics across Europe, but by 1922 he was walking with two sticks, and by 1928 he was paralysed and blind.

Frederick Delius had a financial and artistic success with his incidental music for James Elroy Flecker's play Hassan, with 281 performances at His Majesty's Theatre.

Frederick Delius, Cardus says, spoke with a noticeable Yorkshire accent as he dismissed most English music as paper music that should never be heard, written by people "afraid of their feelin's".

Young English admirer, Eric Fenby, learning that Frederick Delius was trying to compose by dictating to Jelka, volunteered his services as an unpaid amanuensis.

For five years, from 1928, he worked with Frederick Delius, taking down his new compositions from dictation, and helping him revise earlier works.

The violin sonata incorporates the first, incomprehensible, melody that Frederick Delius had attempted to dictate to Fenby before their modus operandi had been worked out.

Frederick Delius was not on the whole an admirer of Elgar's music, but the two men took to each other, and there followed a warm correspondence until Elgar's death in February 1934.

Frederick Delius had wished to be buried in his own garden, but the French authorities forbade it.

Frederick Delius chose St Peter's church, Limpsfield, Surrey as the site for the grave.

The earliest significant experiences in his artistic development came, Frederick Delius later asserted, from the sounds of the plantation songs carried down the river to him at Solano Grove.

When Frederick Delius wrote to Elgar in 1933 of the "beautiful four-part harmonies" of the black plantation workers, he may have been unconsciously alluding to the spirituals sung by the Fisk group.

At Leipzig, Frederick Delius became a fervent disciple of Wagner, whose technique of continuous music he sought to master.

The Norwegian composer, like Frederick Delius, found his primary inspiration in nature and in folk-melodies, and was the stimulus for the Norwegian flavour that characterises much of Frederick Delius's early music.

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Early in his career Frederick Delius drew inspiration from Chopin, later from his own contemporaries Ravel and Richard Strauss, and from the much younger Percy Grainger, who first brought the tune of Brigg Fair to Frederick Delius's notice.

Frederick Delius admired the French composer's orchestration, but thought his works lacking in melody—the latter a comment frequently directed against Frederick Delius's own music.

Hubert Foss, the Oxford University Press's musical editor during the 1920s and 1930s, writes that rather than creating his music from the known possibilities of instruments, Frederick Delius "thought the sounds first" and then sought the means for producing these particular sounds.

The first noticeable stylistic advance is evident in Koanga, with richer chords and faster harmonic rhythms; here we find Frederick Delius "feeling his way towards the vein that he was to tap so surely".

The first of the major works was the orchestral A Song of Summer, based on sketches that Frederick Delius had previously collected under the title of A Poem of Life and Love.

In dictating the new beginning of this work, Frederick Delius asked Fenby to "imagine that we are sitting on the cliffs in the heather, looking out over the sea".

Frederick Delius was much better received in Germany, where a series of successful performances of his works led to what Beecham describes as a Frederick Delius vogue there, "second only to that of Richard Strauss".

From that point onwards the music of Frederick Delius became increasingly familiar to both British and European audiences, as performances of his works proliferated.

Just before his death, Frederick Delius prepared a codicil to his will whereby the royalties on future performances of his music would be used to support an annual concert of works by young composers.

Frederick Delius died before this provision could be legally effected; Fenby says that Beecham then persuaded Jelka in her own will to abandon the concerts idea and apply the royalties towards the editing and recording of Frederick Delius's main works.

In June 1984, at the Grand Theatre, Leeds, the Frederick Delius Trust sponsored a commemorative production of A Village Romeo and Juliet by Opera North, to mark the 50th anniversary of Frederick Delius's death.

Public interest in Frederick Delius's life was stimulated in the UK in 1968, with the showing of the Ken Russell film Song of Summer on BBC Television.

In February 2012 Frederick Delius was one of ten prominent Britons honoured by the Royal Mail in the "Britons of Distinction" stamps set.

In May 1934, when Frederick Delius was close to death, Fenby played him Toye's In a Summer Garden, the last music, Fenby says, that Frederick Delius ever heard.