Frederick Theodore Albert Delius (born Fritz Theodor Albert Delius; ; 29 January 1862 – 10 June 1934) was an English composer. Born in Bradford in the north of England to a prosperous mercantile family, he resisted attempts to recruit him to commerce. He went to Florida in the United States in 1884 to manage his father's orange plantation. He soon neglected his managerial duties, and in 1886 returned to Europe.
Having been influenced by African-American music during his short stay in Florida, he began composing. After a brief period of formal musical study in Germany beginning in 1886, he embarked on a full-time career as a composer in Paris, and then in nearby Grez-sur-Loing, where he and his wife Jelka lived for the rest of their lives, except during the First World War.
Delius's first successes came in Germany, where Hans Haym and other conductors promoted his music from the late 1890s. In Delius's native Britain, his music did not make regular appearances in concert programmes until 1907, when Thomas Beecham took it up. Beecham conducted the full premiere of A Mass of Life in London in 1909 (he had premiered Part II in Germany in 1908). He staged the opera A Village Romeo and Juliet at Covent Garden in 1910, and mounted a six-day Delius festival in London in 1929, as well as making gramophone recordings of many of the composer's works. After 1918, Delius began to suffer the effects of syphilis, contracted during his earlier years in Paris. He became paralysed and blind but completed some compositions between 1928 and 1932 with the aid of an amanuensis, Eric Fenby.
The lyricism in Delius's early compositions reflected the music he had heard in America and the influences of European composers such as Grieg and Wagner. As his skills matured, he developed a style uniquely his own, characterised by his individual orchestration and his uses of chromatic harmony. Delius's music has been only intermittently popular, and often subject to critical attacks. The Delius Society, formed in 1962 by his more dedicated followers, continues to promote knowledge of the composer's life and works, and sponsors the annual Delius Prize competition for young musicians.
Delius was born in Bradford in Yorkshire. He was baptised as Fritz Theodor Albert Delius, and used the forename Fritz until he was about 40. He was the second of four sons – there were also ten daughters – born to Julius Delius (1822–1901) and his wife Elise Pauline, née Krönig (1838–1929). Delius's parents were born in Bielefeld, Westphalia, and Julius's family, originally Dutch, had already lived for several generations in German lands near the Rhine. Julius's father, Ernst Friedrich Delius, had served under Blücher in the Napoleonic Wars. Julius moved to England to further his career as a wool merchant, and became a naturalised British subject in 1850. He married Elise in 1856.
The Delius household was musical. Famous musicians such as Joseph Joachim and Carlo Alfredo Piatti were guests, and played for the family. Despite his German parentage, the young Fritz was drawn to the music of Chopin and Grieg rather than the Austro-German music of Mozart and Beethoven, a preference that endured all his life. The young Delius was first taught the violin by Rudolph Bauerkeller of the Hallé Orchestra, and had more advanced studies under George Haddock of Leeds.
Although Delius achieved enough skill as a violinist to set up as a violin teacher in later years, his chief musical joy was to improvise at the piano, and it was a piano piece, a waltz by Chopin, that gave him his first ecstatic encounter with music. From 1874 to 1878, he was educated at Bradford Grammar School, where the singer John Coates was his slightly older contemporary; Delius then attended the International College at Isleworth (just west of London) between 1878 and 1880. As a pupil he was neither especially quick nor diligent, but the college was conveniently close to the city for Delius to be able to attend concerts and opera.
Julius Delius assumed that his son would play a part in the family wool business, and for the next three years he tried hard to persuade him to do so. Delius's first job was as the firm's representative in Stroud in Gloucestershire, where he did moderately well. However, after being sent in a similar capacity to Chemnitz, he neglected his duties in favour of trips to the major musical centres of Germany, and musical studies with Hans Sitt. His father sent him to Sweden, where he again put his artistic interests ahead of commerce, coming under the influence of the Norwegian dramatists Henrik Ibsen and Gunnar Heiberg. Ibsen's denunciations of social conventions further alienated Delius from his commercial background. He was then sent to represent the firm in France, but frequently absented himself from business for excursions to the French Riviera. After that, Julius Delius recognised that there was no prospect that his son would succeed in the family business, but he remained opposed to music as a profession, and Fritz went to America to manage an orange plantation his father had bought.
It is not clear whether the move to America was Julius's idea or his son's. A leading Florida property firm had branches in several English cities, including Bradford, and, in an article on Delius's time in Florida, William Randel conjectured that either Julius Delius visited the Bradford office and conceived the notion of sending his wayward son to grow oranges in Florida, or that Fritz himself suggested the idea to his father, as a way to escape the hated family wool business. Delius was in Florida from the spring of 1884 to the autumn of 1885, living on a plantation at Solano Grove on the Saint Johns River, about 25 miles (40 kilometres) south of Jacksonville. He continued to be engrossed in music, and in Jacksonville he met Thomas Ward, who became his teacher in counterpoint and composition. Delius later said that Ward's teaching was the only useful music instruction he ever had.
Delius later liked to represent his house at Solano Grove as "a shanty", but it was a substantial cottage of four rooms, with plenty of space for Delius to entertain guests. Ward sometimes stayed there, as did an old Bradford friend, Charles Douglas, and Delius's brother Ernest. Protected from excessive summer heat by river breezes and a canopy of oak trees, the house was an agreeable place to live in.
Delius paid little attention to the business of growing oranges, and continued to pursue his musical interests. Jacksonville had a rich, though to a European, unorthodox musical life. Randel notes that the African-American waiters in local hotels doubled as singers, with daily vocal concerts for patrons and passers-by, giving Delius his introduction to spirituals in local hotels. Additionally, ship owners encouraged their deckhands to sing as they worked. "Delius never forgot the singing as he heard it, day or night, carried sweet and clear across the water to his verandah at Solano Grove, whenever a steam-ship passed; it is hard to imagine conditions less conducive to cultivating oranges – or more conducive to composing."
While in Florida, Delius had his first composition published, a polka for piano called Zum Carnival. In late 1885 he left a caretaker in charge of Solano Grove and moved to Danville, Virginia. Thereafter he pursued a wholly musical career. An advertisement in the local paper announced, "Fritz Delius will begin at once giving instruction in Piano, Violin, Theory and Composition. He will give lessons at the residences of his pupils. Terms reasonable." Delius also offered lessons in French and German. Danville had a thriving musical life, and early works of his were publicly performed there.
During his time in Florida, Delius is alleged to have fathered a son with a local African-American woman named Chloe. Upon Delius's return to Florida some years later to sell the plantation, it was suggested that Chloe, fearing that he had come to take her son away from her, fled with the child and disappeared. In the 1990s the violinist Tasmin Little embarked on a search for descendants of Delius's alleged love-child. Little believes that his failure to track down his son had been a significant influence in the tone of his works thereafter.