Frederick Delius

He was born in Bradford to German parents, managed an orange grove in Florida, studied in Leipzig, and settled in the French village of Grez-sur-Loing, where he died. Of those, Florida and France mark the music most.

He is the awkward case in the English repertoire. Orchestral repertoire means the works an orchestra keeps in circulation, the pieces it can put on with three or four rehearsals because the players half know them already, and Delius sits at the edge of it: two or three short pieces are played constantly, the large works almost never.

Bradford, Florida, Leipzig, Grez

The route matters because each stage left something audible. Delius was sent to Solano Grove, an orange plantation on the St Johns River in Florida, in 1884, ostensibly to learn the wool trade's colonial end and in practice to be got out of the way. He neglected the oranges, took harmony lessons from a Jacksonville organist named Thomas Ward, and listened at night to the singing of the black workers on the neighbouring plantations. Those months, he said afterwards, taught him more about harmony than any conservatoire, and the Florida Suite of 1887 and the choral orchestral Appalachia of 1902 come directly from them.

Leipzig followed, where he met Grieg, whose advocacy persuaded Delius's father to fund the composing life. From 1897 he lived at Grez-sur-Loing, about 70 kilometres south of Paris, for the rest of his life. He was never part of English musical life and had almost no interest in it, which is one reason his reputation in Britain depended so heavily on one conductor.

What the harmony actually does

Delius's harmony works by suspension rather than by progression, and that single fact explains both the appeal and the difficulty. Four features recur.

• Chords are thickened. Sevenths, ninths and added notes are the normal state rather than an event, so no chord sounds like a point of rest.
• Progressions slide rather than resolve. One chord moves to a neighbour a step away by voice leading, not by the pull of dominant to tonic, so the harmony drifts across the bar line.
• Cadences are avoided. A phrase reaches what should be a full stop and the bass moves under it, so the music does not stop, it dissolves.
• Themes do not develop. There is no argument in the German sense, no working out of a subject, no fugue. A tune appears, is coloured, and returns.

The scoring reinforces all of it. Delius writes divided strings in many parts, doubles wind lines with muted horns, and uses the harp, glockenspiel and celesta for colour rather than accent. The xylophone he barely touches, because it articulates, and articulation is what he is avoiding.

Why conductors either love him or cannot make him work

The problem is that music without harmonic drive has to be driven by something else, and Delius does not print the instructions. A score by Elgar tells the conductor what to do in obsessive detail. A Delius score gives a slow tempo, a rich chord and no indication of where the phrase is going, because the answer is a judgement about a line that may run for 30 bars. Conducted without that judgement the music sags, the pulse disappears, and the piece becomes an undifferentiated wash. Delius performances therefore vary more widely than almost anything else in the repertoire, and orchestras used to playing him fare much better than orchestras meeting him cold.

The works

The catalogue divides cleanly into short orchestral pieces of ten minutes or so, which are the ones played, and large choral works of an evening's weight, which are not.

A Mass of Life is the scale problem in one line. It needs four soloists, a chorus divided into eight parts and a very large orchestra, it is sung in German by choirs whose language is not German, and it fills an evening. Societies that will attempt Verdi will not attempt it, and the work most Delius scholars regard as his largest achievement is performed perhaps once a decade in Britain.

Fenby, Beecham and the last years

By the mid 1920s Delius was blind and paralysed, the effects generally attributed to syphilis contracted decades earlier, and he could no longer write a note down. In 1928 Eric Fenby, a young organist from Scarborough who had never met him, wrote offering to work as his amanuensis without payment. Fenby stayed at Grez until Delius died in 1934.

The method they developed was largely Fenby's invention. Delius dictated by calling out note names, register and chord positions; Fenby wrote them, played them back, and the two revised by argument. Several substantial works came out of it, among them A Song of Summer, Songs of Farewell, the Third Violin Sonata and the Irmelin Prelude. None would exist otherwise.

Sir Thomas Beecham, who founded the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in 1946, was the other indispensable figure. He conducted Delius from early in his career, mounted a six concert Delius Festival in London in 1929, to which the composer was brought from France, recorded a great deal of the music, and published a biography in 1959. Beecham's advocacy is why Delius entered the British repertoire at all, and also why the performing tradition narrowed to the handful of short pieces he programmed most: an advocate who succeeds decides which works get remembered.

Also in this programme

• The repertoireThe pieces that keep coming back, and why
• Edward ElgarThe Enigma Variations, the Cello Concerto and the symphonies
• Ralph Vaughan WilliamsThe Tallis Fantasia, the Lark and the symphonies
• Karl JenkinsThe most performed living Welsh composer