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 he mounted a six-day Delius festival in London in 1929, as well as making gramophone recordings of many of Delius's works.

Brigg Fair ( 1907 ) announced the composer's full stylistic maturity, the first of the pieces for small orchestra which confirm Delius's status as a musical poet, with the influences of Wagner and Grieg almost entirely absent.

The 3-disc 1929 recording of Delius's Sea Drift, arising from the Delius Festival that year, suffered by being crammed onto six sides and was withdrawn before 1936, probably as a result of the standardisation on 78 revolutions per minute.

Delius's first successes came in Germany, where Hans Haym and other conductors promoted his music from the late 1890s.

There was no return to the prosperity of pre-war years: Delius's medical treatment was an additional expense, his blindness prevented him from composing, and his royalties were curtailed by the lack of continental performances of his music.

Beecham was temporarily absent from the concert hall and opera house between 1920 and 1923, but Coates gave the first performance of A Song of the High Hills in 1920, and Henry Wood and Hamilton Harty programmed Delius's music with the Queen's Hall and Hallé Orchestras.

Together they produced Cynara ( a setting of words by Ernest Dowson ), A Late Lark ( a setting of W. E. Henley ), A Song of Summer, a third violin sonata, the Irmelin prelude, and Idyll ( 1932 ), which reused music from Delius's short opera Margot la rouge, composed thirty years earlier.

Delius's familiarity with " black " music possibly predates his American adventures ; during the 1870s a popular singing group, the Fisk Jubilee Singers from Nashville, Tennessee, toured Britain and Europe, giving several well-received concerts in Bradford.

An ability to construct long musical paragraphs is, according to the Delius scholar Christopher Palmer, Delius's lasting debt to Wagner, from whom he also acquired a knowledge of chromatic harmonic technique, " an endlessly proliferating sensuousness of sound ".

Early in his career Delius drew inspiration from Chopin, later from his own contemporaries Ravel and Richard Strauss, and from the much younger Percy Grainger, who first brought the tune of Brigg Fair to Delius's notice.

Woodcut illustration ( 1919 ) of the young lovers from Gottfried Keller's original story, which became Delius's opera A Village Romeo and Juliet

After 1917, according to Payne, there was a general deterioration both in the quantity and quality of Delius's output as illness took hold, though Payne exempts the incidental music to Hassan ( 1920 – 23 ) from condemnation, believing that it contains some of Delius's best work.

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.

Beecham's presentation of A Mass of Life at the Queen's Hall in June 1909 did not inspire Hans Haym, who had come from Elberfeld for the concert, though Beecham says that many professional and amateur musicians thought it " the most impressive and original achievement of its genre written in the last fifty years " Some reviewers, nevertheless, doubted the popular appeal of Delius's music, while others were more specifically hostile.

Beecham had died in 1961, and Fenby writes that it " seemed to many then that nothing could save Delius's music from extinction ", such was the conductor's unique mastery over the music.

The first recordings of Delius's works, in 1927, were conducted by Beecham for the Columbia label: the " Walk to the Paradise Garden " interlude from A Village Romeo and Juliet, and On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, performed by the orchestra of the Royal Philharmonic Society.

In 1925, while he was still studying, he had the wonderful opportunity to sing in Delius's A Mass of Life at the Queen's Hall for the Royal Philharmonic Society, and was able to prepare the work and sing it from memory with the greatest success, within three weeks.

Heseltine borrowed a copy of the score of Sea Drift from Mason — he thought it " heavenly "— and was soon requesting funds from his mother so that he could buy more of Delius's music.

Having remarked on Delius's detachment from the general musical scene — no academic position, no public appearances, no conducting or any performance upon an instrument — Heseltine wrote: " There can be no superficial view of Delius's music: either one feels it in the very depths of one's being, or not at all ".

) so that it is called for in, for example, Jules Massenet's Esclarmonde ( 1889 ), Visions ( 1891 ) and Suite parnassienne ( 1912 ); Maurice Ravel's Shéhérazade overture ( 1898 ), Rapsodie espagnole ( 1907 ) and L ' heure espagnole ( 1907 – 09 ); Ignacy Jan Paderewski's Symphony in B minor " Polonia " ( 1903-08 ; 3 sarrusophones are called for ); Frederick Delius's Requiem ( 1913-16 ); and Arrigo Boito's Nerone ( 1924 ).

In Delius's native Britain, it was 1907 before his music made regular appearances in concert programmes, after Thomas Beecham took it up.

In spite of encouraging reviews, Delius's orchestral music was not heard again in an English concert hall until 1907.

He was delighted to discover Cynara, for voice and orchestra, abandoned since 1907, though Delius's assistant Eric Fenby was shocked by Heseltine's private disparaging of much of Delius's work.

In 1906 he heard Frederick Delius's Sea Drift in Essen with the composer present, and promised to Delius that when he had his own orchestra he would conduct it himself, which he did in Frankfurt with Delius again in the audience.

From 1910, Delius's works began to be heard in America: Brigg Fair and In a Summer Garden were performed in 1910 – 11 by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra under Walter Damrosch.

Beecham, who had hitherto known nothing of Delius's music, expressed his " wonderment " and became a lifelong devotee of the composer's works.

In 1909, Beecham conducted the first complete performance of A Mass of Life, the largest and most ambitious of Delius's concert works, written for four soloists, a double choir, and a large orchestra.

One of Delius's major war-time works was his Requiem, dedicated " to the memory of all young Artists fallen in the war ".

In Germany, the regular presentation of Delius's works ceased at the outbreak of the war, and never resumed.

It was this singing, he told Fenby, that first gave him the urge to express himself in music ; thus, writes Fenby, many of Delius's early works are " redolent of Negro hymnology and folk-song ", a sound " not heard before in the orchestra, and seldom since ".

Delius admired the French composer's orchestration, but thought his works lacking in melody — the latter a comment frequently directed against Delius's own music.

In the more mature works Foss observes Delius's increasing rejection of conventional forms such as sonata or concerto ; Delius's music, he comments, is " certainly not architectural ; nearer to painting, especially to the pointilliste style of design ".

These works became part of the standard English concert repertory, and helped to establish the character of Delius's music in the English concert-goer's mind, although according to Ernest Newman, the concentration on these works to the neglect of his wider output may have done Delius as much harm as good.

His choral works of the period, notably An Arabesque ( 1911 ) and A Song of the High Hills ( 1911 ) are among the most radical of Delius's writings in their juxtapositions of unrelated chords.

Cardus's verdict, however, is that Delius's chamber and concerto works are largely failures.

After Delius's death Beecham continued to promote his works ; a second festival was held in 1946, and a third ( after Beecham's death ) at Bradford in 1962, to celebrate the centenary of Delius's birth.

Delius died before this provision could be legally effected ; according to Fenby, Beecham then persuaded Jelka in her own will to abandon the concerts idea and apply the royalties towards the editing and recording of Delius's main works.

Its general objectives are the furtherance of knowledge of Delius's life and works, and the encouragement of performances and recordings.

Beecham stresses Delius's role as an innovator: " The best of Delius is undoubtedly to be found in those works where he disregarded classical traditions and created his own forms ".

The Welsh years were marked by intense creative compositional and literary activity ; some of Heseltine's best-known vocal works, including the song-cycles Lilligay and The Curlew were completed, along with numerous songs and choral settings, and a strings serenade composed to honour Delius's 60th birthday.

Heseltine also edited and transcribed a large amount of early English music, and continued to make arrangements of Delius's works.