Page "Frederick Delius" Paragraph 48

The four-year association with Fenby from 1929 produced two major works, and several smaller pieces often drawn from unpublished music from Delius's early career.

The first of the major works was the orchestral A Song of Summer, based on sketches that Delius had previously collected under the title of A Poem of Life and Love.

In dictating the new beginning of this work, Delius asked Fenby to " imagine that we are sitting on the cliffs in the heather, looking out over the sea ".

This does not, says Fenby, indicate that the dictation process was calm and leisurely ; the mood was usually frenzied and nerve-wracking.

The other major work, a setting of Walt Whitman poems with the title Songs of Farewell, was an even more alarming prospect to Fenby: " the complexity of thinking in so many strands, often all at once ; the problems of orchestral and vocal balance ; the wider area of possible misunderstandings ..." combined to leave Delius and his helper exhausted after each session of work — yet both these works were ready for performance in 1932.

Of the music in this final choral work, Beecham wrote of its " hard, masculine vigour, reminiscent in mood and fibre of some of the great choral passages in A Mass of Life ".

Payne describes the work as " bracing and exultant, with in places an almost Holstian clarity ".