Frederick Delius

A few weeks ago I was doing a scan on my car radio, and halted at some lovely bars of music that, although unfamiliar, I immediately took for the work of Frederick Delius. I was right: It was the closing minute of his North Country Sketches.

Delius's "fingerprints" are as distinctive as those of any composer -- I'm pretty good at this sort of identification, but he's an easy one. I couldn't describe the technicalities of his style, but the combination of yearning, rhapsodic melody and sensitive instrumentation is a give-away. Despite Delius's cosmopolitanism -- he spent considerable time in France, America, and Norway -- he helped to define a distinctly English sound in "nature music"; he frequently uses words such as summer, spring, sunrise, sunset, garden in his titles. Like Berlioz, he is not much of one for conventional structures: he composed some idiosyncratic concertos and sonatas, but no symphonies. His music is non-architectural; it is all, to borrow one of his titles, "over the hills and far away." (Sea Drift is another title that conveys the Delian flavor.)

I became familiar with Delius early in my classical music listening as an adolescent, in part because WNET, the public television station for the New York area, caught my interest by screening Ken Russell's television biography of him, Song of Summer, in 1971 or 1972. Russell made this for BBC's Omnibus series in 1968. It is one of his most restrained films, and for that reason critics sometimes use it as a weapon to attack his later, more hyberbolic musical biographies such as The Music Lovers (Tchaikovsky), Mahler, and Lisztomania. I have no interest in doing that, but must concur that Song of Summer, which I just re-watched for the first time in almost 40 years, is unquestionably a masterpiece.

Song of Summer grows out of the unusual denouement of Delius's composing career. Having contracted syphilis in Florida in the 1880s, by the 1920s he was blind and partially paralyzed, living in isolation in France with his much put-upon wife Jelka (a German painter; Delius's own parents were German). An idealistic young Yorkshire musician, Eric Fenby, got wind of Delius's plight and offered himself as an amanuensis to help the old man compose again. Little did he know what he was letting himself in for. Delius was impossible, demanding, conceited; Fenby spent the better part of six years catering to him, but eventually had a nervous breakdown, suffered from hysterical paralysis (in imitation of the master?), and was (in his own words) "completely burnt out." (In the film, composer Percy Grainger warns Fenby that by the time he's done, he'll never want to hear another bar of Delius again.) One gets the sense that Fenby never completely got over the whole ordeal; the lingering scars were not assisted in their fading by the fact that, for the remaining 63 years of his life, Fenby was completely identified with Delius, in his musical career and in the public mind.

Fenby worked on the screenplay for Song of Summer with Russell; it covers just those last six years, 1928-1934. It was filmed very unfussily, in stark black and white. The three central performances -- Max Adrian as Delius, Christopher Gable as Fenby, Maureen Pryor as Jelka -- couldn't be bettered. The movie deals with issues that never go away -- does the artist's responsibility to his art excuse abominable behavior to others? Do others have an obligation to the artist to help him achieve his art? Since so many great artists are narcissists and monomaniacs (rather like CEOs, honestly), the situations depicted in Song of Summer manifest themselves continually over the years in new guises. Russell and Fenby clearly believe that art is worth a great deal of discomfort, that joy and pain cannot be unblent; the final image is ecstatic -- the wheelchair-bound Jelka scattering rose petals over her husband's corpse. (She died just four days after him.)

Song of Summer is a subtle, mature, radiant film; and in watching it again, I realized what an unusual 13 or 14-year-old I must have been, to so greatly appreciate such a piece at that age. My mother always said that her friends just did not know what to make of me -- apparently I was using multi-syllabic words in complete sentences at age three! -- and I think I finally understand now the odd impression I must have made.