Frederick Delius

Some biographies, notably Boswell's life of Johnson, are as interesting on account of the biographer as because of the subject. For me, Beecham's biography of Delius is very definitely in this category. Beecham was not greatly in sympathy with English music (unless you count Handel), but as a young man he had been `electrified' (his own word) on first hearing Delius. The association that developed between an interpreter universally acknowledged as great in his field and a composer whose stature is still subject to discussion has no parallel that I can think of. They became close companions as well as artistic colleagues, and Beecham delivered the funeral eulogy on the friend whose inspiration had done so much to set his own alight. The composer's widow had first suggested such a book to Beecham, perhaps with slightly unrealistic expectations as to what it might consist of. Bereaved companion and wholehearted admirer Beecham might have been, but, in a highly characteristic sentence, Beecham finally went about the task long after the death of Jelka Delius in the conviction that `the temptation to burden Frederick with a load of highly undesirable virtues must be sternly resisted.' In fact Beecham skates delicately around the two most notorious aspects of his subject's life - his death from syphilis and his highly suspect belief in some species of Caucasian supremacy. Regarding the latter, Beecham offers his own belief that Delius had no really coherent philosophical outlook other than a wholesale contempt for and rejection of religion. This world-view Beecham terms `Pyrrhonism', and it takes no great reading between the lines to sense that it was an outlook that he shared, albeit from a more worldly and tolerant standpoint. I myself share entirely Beecham's opinion that the Mass of Life, to poetry by Nietzsche, is Delius's greatest composition, while reserving judgment as to whether it can legitimately be compared with Bach's B minor Mass. I am much clearer that neither the text nor the music have any political dimension whatsoever, and that this great work can certainly stand alongside Mahler's eighth symphony. As regards the affliction that brought Delius to physical ruin, I suppose it would take Beecham to describe it as the way in which Aphrodite Pandemos repaid her devotee in his younger days, and in general Beecham is very brief and summary regarding Delius's relations with women. Nobody, I suppose, was in as good a position as Beecham was to portray his friend in detail. He makes reference to such earlier biographical studies as then existed, notably the hagiographical production of Philip Heseltine, the composer Peter Warlock, a work that Beecham characterises as `juvenile', and indeed Heseltine was a lifelong juvenile. His own study is affectionate and closely observed, with Beecham's characteristic humour and wit in the description of Delius's manner of speaking, with a Yorkshire accent overlaid with strange locutions deriving from the