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Europeans Rediscover Delius: Two Creative Operatic Revivals
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14365 |
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THE ARTS
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6 / 1988 |
1,959 Words |
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Andrew Clark
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The music of Frederick Delius is finally starting to win a proper hearing in Europe. It has always had its devotees in Britain and America, mainly because of a performance tradition dating back to the composer's lifetime, and partly because of the affinities of Delius' background with English-language culture. Until recently, however, central Europe showed nothing but indifference. Now German-speaking audiences are being given the chance to rediscover Deluis.
It is a curious phenomenon. The German music world spent more than thirty years after the Second World War trying to ignore or forget its late romantic and early modern heritage, and then about fifteen years ago started on a voyage of rediscovery. Much of the resurrected music was not to postwar taste, which glorified the tradition created by Schoenberg and his disciples of the Second Viennese School. The pendulum is now swinging back. German orchestras and opera houses are giving a novel slant to their programs by reintroducing repertoire that was fashionable in the first forty years of this century. It may not all be quality stuff, but it is part of the German cultural heritage. The consensus now is that European musical life is richer for it.
Where does Delius fit into all this? Much of his music shares the rich orchestration of other neglected late Romantics. Some of his operas and orchestral works received their premieres in Germany in the early years of this century, when the composer was ignored in Britain. The predominant influences in his family background and musical training were German. As musicians and audiences search out hidden corners of the repertoire to avoid the familiarity of the nineteenth century or the complexity of the moderns, new interest in Delius seems timely. And yet, in most respects, his links with his late Romantic contemporaries are largely coincidental.
Delius never fitted any conventional pattern, either in the way he lived or composed. Born in 1862 in Bradford, England, into an immigrant family of German wool merchants, he spent several carefree years as a young man in Florida, studied music in Leipzig, was a regular visitor to Scandinavia, and lived the last thirty-seven years of his life in comparative peace at Grez-sur-Loing near Fontainebleau, France. In his early sixties, increasing paralysis and blindness curtailed his activity and, after dictating a final group of compositions to his devoted amanuensis Eric Fenby, he died in 1934 and was buried at Limpsfield in England.
The spread of Delius' reputation is often attributed to the English conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, who championed the composer for most of his lifetime, wrote a biography of Delius, and bequeathed a legacy of unsurpassed commercial recordings of Delius' works. But even Beecham was highly selective in his approach to Delius' music, and his judgment was not infallible. Two recent productions of Delius operas in central Europe have underscored that the music can only benefit from being brought out from under the exclusive veil of Beecham's magic.
After the Berlin premiere of A Village Romeo and Juliet in 1907, it was Beecham who organized the only three productions to be given in the following fifty years, all in England, and who made the recording by which subsequent performances have tended to be judged. In 1972, ten years after Beecham's death, the American premiere finally took place in Washington, quickly followed by performances in New York and
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