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Evening Star, Issue 21744, 12 June 1934, Page 9

that he lived in Paris, and for the last thirty-odd years Grez-sur : Loing, near Fontainebleau, had been bis home, with its garden and its river that the world has •come to know in his music. Two characteristics of his music of the highest importance, it has been said, follow from the circumstances of his career: one is that by no possible stretch of language or imagination can Delius be called a nationalist composer; the other is that wrought into the very stuff and substance of his music is the beauty of natural scenery. Botli points demand a little elaboration. _ In one respect, a winter in ‘ The Times ’ has said, Delius touches English musical tradition: his most perfect works are cantatas for chorus and orchestra. They are not in the least like traditional English oratorio; some of his choral writing is wordless, much of it is ungrateful to the singer (this because he is a harmonic rather than a contrapuntal composer). But ‘ Sea Drift,’ ‘Appalachia,’ ‘ Songs of Sunset,’ 1 A Song of the High Hills,’ and 1 The Mass of Life ’ all employ a chorus to a greater or less extent, and with the exception of the operas may be taken as his most significant works. But in none of these, nor in any other of his compositions, is there any trace of anything that can be called British national character such as can be felt in totally dissimilar work by composers from Byrd to Arne, from Parry to Elgar, from Sullivan to Vaughan Williams. Bach and Beethoven wrote for all the world, but their music is still German music; nearly every young composer to-day uses a cosmopolitan idiom. Delius is neither national nor cosmopolitan—ho is himself; _ and, barring a few slight marks of kinship with Chopin, Wagner, and Grieg (as most commentators are agreed), his. music defies not only classification, but 1 analysis. For beyond saying that it is essentially chromatic and harmonic (i.e., that melody, rhythm, 1 and counterpoint are far less important than the vertical combination of sounds which beguile the ear from moment to moment), his style, so markedly and decisively his own, resists description in technical terms. Aesthetic _ discussion is not quite so difficult. His music has already been called pensive, but it is not intellectual; neither, except in the case of ‘ Appalachia,’ is it emotional. His is the music of sensibility; it is not psychologically descriptive as is that of Strauss, nor is it pictorial as is that of Respighi, nor is it music of the nervous system as is much of Debussy. It is something of them all—the expression of the reaction of an acutely sensitive mind to visual experience, and to that visual experience his wide travels contributed much. Delius’s music has been described by one of his most enthusiastic admirers as the autumn of that romantic sentiment which found its morning in Beethoven and its noon in Wagner. It is the richly decadent beauty of autumn colours; its feeling is not so much sad as pensive. But more than either of these two qualities it is contemplative rather than active. He has written two ‘ Dance Rhapsodies ’; they are not, however, the rhapsodies of the dancer, but oL- the spectator at the dance of life. There is,, that is to say, an absence of rhythmic vitality which marks it off sharply from the “ new ” music of his younger contemporaries. But then, Delius’s music resists all comparison with any other music in the repertory of to-day not only in matters of technique but of spirit. In October, 1929, a six-day festival of the works of Delius ifras given in the Queen’s Hall, London. The composer, in his sixty-eighth year, and, unhappily, paralysed and blind, made the journey from his home in France to be present at an event, which was without exact parallel in the history of British music. The festival was promoted by Sir. Thomas Beecham,. a consistent advocate through many years of the unique character and high quality of this composer’s art.