I reacquainted myself with the music of Frederick Delius
this afternoon. There was a time when I was heavily into Delius,
interestingly at about the same time as I was into Kate Bush. She even wrote a
song about him.
His isn’t the easiest music to associate with; it doesn’t
have the prettiness of Tchaikovsky, the drama of Wagner or the bluster of
Beethoven, and I've often wondered what the source of its appeal is. Today I came
to a tentative theory.
The music of Delius is fluid, earthy, and yet intensely
ethereal, and so it has what it takes to describe the lowland English landscape
perfectly: water, earth and air. But this isn’t the music of moor, mountain,
forest and flood. It’s specifically the music of old hay meadows, slow moving rivers, and
riotously colourful rural gardens. It describes a comfortable landscape, lived
in and enjoyed by those who are comfortable with their surroundings. And its great
triumph is that it goes beyond the surface trappings to distil the essence of
the energy that the more sensitive among us feel deep in our heart’s core.
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