| OPERA : Pelléas et Mélisande. | |
| ORCHESTRA : L'Après Midi d'un Faune; Nocturnes; La Mer; Iberia; incidental music to Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien. | |
| CHORAL : L'Enfant Prodigue; La Demoiselle Elue; Proses Lyriques; Songs; Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien; Sirènes. | |
| CHAMBER MUSIC : String Quartet; Sonata for Violin and Piano; Sonata for Violoncello and Piano, etc. | |
| Compositions for piano. |
| VICTOR : Iberia (Coppola); Rhapsody for Orchestra; L'Après Midi d'un Faune (Stokowski); Children's Suite (Cortot); Les Fêtes; Cathédrale Engloutie (orchestrated); Danse Sacre et Profane (Stokowski) ; Pelléas et Mélisande (excerpts); Piano Prétudes, Book I (Cortot); La Mer; Rhapsody for Clarinet and Orchestra. | |
| COLUMBIA : Quartet in G-Minor (Lener); Petite Suite (Godfrey) ; Sonata for Violoncello and Piano (Cassado-Mendelssohn- Gordigiani); Suite Bergamasque (Gieseking). |
Manuel de Falla
See Falla, Manuel de
"No one in the world of music has been more unbendingly and more uncompromisingly true to himself than Delius."-- PERCY GRAINGER
FREDERICK DELIUS, one of the truly great composers of our age, was born in Bradford, England, on Jannary 29, 1863. His parents were Germans who had migrated to England and settled there. Music was Delius' native language almost from the very first. He studied the violin from early childhood, making remarkable strides; and music was his favorite pastime and pleasure. "My first great musical impression," he told us, "was hearing the posthumous Valse of Chopin, which a friend of my father's played for me when I was ten years old. It made a most extraordinary impression upon me. Until then I had heard only Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven, and it was as if an entirely new world had opened up to me. I remember that after hearing it twice, I could play the whole piece thru from memory."
Delius' parents, however, were stubbornly opposed to his adopting music as a profession, selecting instead a mercantile career for him. The amazing aptitude which Frederick showed for his musical studies merely made them more stubborn in their decision, until they finally forebade him any association whatsoever with music. Business, before long, grew so painfully distasteful to young Delius that, in his twentieth year, he ran away from the fate which his parents had meted out to him. Crossing the Atlantic, he settled in Florida as an orange planter. Leisure hours were devoted to a serious study of music-- from harmony and theory textbooks. He has recorded his impressions of his years in America in an early work called Appalachia.
Except for a short period in Danville, Virginia--where he was a private music- teacher to a family--Delius remained in Florida during his entire American sojourn, long enough to save money to be able to continue his music studies with greater application. After several years, he returned to Europe, entering the Leipzig Conservatory of Music, to study under Jadassohn and Reinecke. In Leipzig, he met and became a friend of Edvard Grieg, who was then residing in that musical Mecca; it was Grieg who first told Delius that his music showed enormous promise.
Since 1890, Delius has lived principally in France, either in Paris or in the country town of Grez-sur-Loing (Seine et Loire)--the haunt of Robert Louis Stevenson--where he bought a villa in 1899.
Delius' first published work was a Legende for violin solo and orchestra, which dates from 1892. This was followed by a "fantastic-overture" Over the Hills and Far Away ( 1893) and a Piano Concerto in C-Minor. By 1897,
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