Delius: Man and Music.

I watched the first half of a BBC documentary on the composer Frederick Delius last night. I sometimes wonder why the lives and minds of composers fascinate me so much, and why I’m drawn to documentaries on them more than almost any other subject – especially when the composer under scrutiny belongs to the English Late Romantic School.

I suppose it’s because the subject of music itself fascinates me. Music is very important to me and I regard it as the foremost of all the creative disciplines. The others generally need, at least to some extent, to be passed through the filter of the mind in order to be appreciated. Music has the capacity to go straight to the heart. And what intrigues me about music is this:

The standard chromatic scale has eleven notes. Just eleven. And yet composers somehow manage to keep on finding new ways to arrange those notes into an ever growing catalogue of melodies which have never been heard before. Many of those melodies can touch and sear the heart with tremendous power, leaving the sensitive soul breathless and tear-ridden. If I were to write a melody it would reach the bottom of a trash can without touching the sides. How on earth do they do it?

And they are endlessly inventive in finding new ways to present those melodies with colour, harmony, structure and a variety of accompaniments. More than that, they go on and on finding new ways to broaden the scope of the whole subject. May it be speculated that music has no limits, that it is a rare example of something that is truly infinite? Maybe a mathematician might know the answer to that one, but I don’t and so the concept fascinates me.

One documentary interviewee, himself a composer, was asked what he thought made the music of Delius so special. He replied: ‘oh, undoubtedly its sensuality.’ And that, I think, is true of all the music of the English Late Romantics; it all has one form of sensuality or another at its core. In Delius’s case, at least in his early works, there is much of the carnal form. Sir Thomas Beecham, a conductor who was an early champion of Delius, called him ‘a goat.’ And Poor Delius spent the last ten years of his life blind and paralysed from the effects of syphilis. It seems that what drove a great composer could also punish him quite horribly. Hardly seems fair, does it?