I’m tracking the path of that great, but lesser known “British” composer Frederick Delius (1862-1934), who spent nine months in Danville (Sept. 1885 - June 1886) teaching music to earn fare to Europe, where he pursued a career as a composer. (Earlier, he had made an unsuccessful attempt to grow oranges in Florida from March 1884 to Sept. 1885, an enterprise designed to assuage the fears, yet escape the scrutiny of his father in England, who wished to hem in the wayward, artistically inclined lad: a classic biographical episode in the lives of artists.) Delius and his music now have an international reputation and have become a minor classic. One can’t go into almost any record store with a classical music section of moderate size and not find Delius CD’s. He’s quite well represented by recordings, several versions existing of his most important works. And it’s my love of that music and my desire to see some of its origins that inspired me to come here.
I’m not the first. Clare Delius, the composer’s sister, sought information in 1935 for a biography of her brother by writing to “Headmaster of the School, Danville, VA”. Then Gerard Tetley, editor of the Danville Bee, having seen the above letter, was inspired to research the Delius Danville days by interviewing and publishing articles in the 40’s and 50’s. In the fall of 1950 the eminent British conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, Delius’s friend and champion, visited Florida and Burleigh (a plantation home 20 miles south of Danville) seeking information for his Delius biography, and Professor Randel made a visit for his 1971 article “Delius in America”. And more recently, a centennial celebration commemorating Delius’s residence in Danville was held in 1986, attracting leading Delius scholars and enthusiasts, and culminating in a book (“Delius in Danville”), the unveiling of an historic marker denoting Delius’s residence, and performance of his work “Appalachia”.
“Your new work [Appalachia] demonstrates to me that for you everything in the world that you see and experience with emotion can become music, that the world surrounds you in terms of ‘sound’ and that these sounds you carry in your very being.” So wrote the German conductor Julius Buths regarding the 1902 Delius masterpiece “Appalachia”, a work that records in most telling fashion the musical and atmospheric impressions his stay in America had on him.
The most tangible musical evidence of his American adventure is the tune he used as the basis for the variations in “Appalachia”, one that he heard the Afro-American workers singing in the tobacco stemmeries when wandering the bustling tobacco district of Danville. (Delius might have heard this tune earlier in Florida, either from the deckhands of steamships on the St. Johns River, his own plantation hands, or the Afro-American waiters who doubled as singers in the hotels of Jacksonville, Florida.) “Appalachia” suggests the sights and sounds of his American odyssey, kaleidoscopically shifting between musical images suggesting the lush, semi-tropical Florida, and at times the landscape and society of southern Virginia. To my ears, one can hear the activity of the wharfs in Jacksonville or tobacco district in Danville, a waltz at a society event, the blaring of a military band, etc.
And as backdrop to all in “Appalachia” is the natural setting: the resplendent sunrise music at beginning, the many nocturnal soliloquies with their cool air and quiet rustlings of water and leaves, etc. “I believe, myself, in no doctrine whatever--and in nothing but in Nature and in the great forces of Nature” wrote Delius. Whether the ocean in “Sea Drift”, or the mountains and meadows in the “Mass of Life”, the natural environment permeates his work. Indeed, it was Delius’s experience of the natural wonders of the American continent (and its indigenous music) that became the catalyst to his decision to create music, and his future destiny as a composer.
This big musical scrapbook of his youthful memories (“Appalachia”) was composed in 1902 (completely transforming an earlier 1896 version), a full 16 years after his first visit to America, echoing another major theme of his art: the backward gaze in time. “Nostalgia became Delius like a garment of truth” wrote Geoffrey Crankshaw for the jacket notes of a Delius album. Somehow, unexplainably, Delius was able to create a musical language that evokes reflection on the past, and correspondingly, the transience of life. This explains the “concentrated loveliness” in his music --an awareness of beauty intensified by conciousness of its mortality. Filtered through the prism of his music we encounter the passing of nature (“To Daffodils”), severed relationships (“Sea Drift”, “Songs of Sunset”), and human mortality (“Songs of Farewell”, “A Late Lark”). But the “great forces of Nature” renew life, and in Delius we find an equal obsession with spring and summer (“On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring”, “In A Summer Garden”, “A Song of Summer”): apparently Delius was a sun worshipping pagan.
So in “Appalachia”, in spite of its narrow topical focus, we encounter the major themes of his life’s work, emphasizing its centrality in his canon, and the role of the American landscape and indigenous music in that work, specifically those of Florida and Virginia. (Delius was also influenced by Scandinavian and English folk music, as well as contemporary art music, especially Chopin, Grieg, and Wagner, making him a true musical cosmopolitan.)
My journey, my pilgrimage to Danville was conducted very much in that Delian spirit of recapturing the past, to discover what remained of those days when the young composer was taking his earliest tentative steps. My first encounter with that past occurred late afternoon on my day of arrival, in that amazing neighborhood of Victorian homes on North Main Street: many of these houses stood when Delius was here. Old buildings are time machines. And the spirit of late Victorian times, the “fin-de- siecle”, hangs in the air, evoked by the ghosts of the lives that passed through these buildings, Frederick Delius among them. I silently commended the efforts made to preserve these structures. While seeking a bed and breakfast on North Main, I met a friendly resident who toured me through her turn-of-the-century house, making a pleasant introduction to Danville. Unable to find a room here, I locate comfortable, non-historic, lodging on the other side of the Dan River, and settle in that evening.
The next morning I was waiting in the lobby of my motel for Gary Grant of the Danville Historical Society, someone I had corresponded with regarding my visit to the city, and my interest in seeing the Delius sites. The affable gentleman who greeted me that morning proved to be a most agreeable and informative tour guide. (I have the benefit of his previous experience in touring Delius scholars.) It was a pleasant first day of fall, perfect for out-of-car mini excursions.
Our first stop was the Virginia State Historical Marker at North Main and Keen Streets, marking the location (or close to it) of Delius’s Danville residence. After picture taking we tracked the route that Delius would regularly have taken to work with his two friends Professor Robert Phifer, Head of Music at Roanoke Female College, and Frederick Hoppe, who was employed in a saloon in the tobacco district. Here we encounter in Delius’s social interests a classic example of the dichotomy to be found running through his life: the refined aesthete, comfortable in a cultured, artistic environment (he was raised in a upper-middle class home in Bradford, England, where his father was a wealthy wool merchant), and the free-spirited adventurer, eager for rowdy companionship. Similarly, Thomas Beecham contrasts his “general air of fastidiousness and sober elegance” to his preferred provincial dialect of northern England. (Even in his music, one writer contrasts its feline repose with the moments it pounces on the listener unawares. To extend the musical analogy of the “Delian dichotomy” further, one may observe how Delius borrowed from the folk music idioms of America, England, and Scandinavia, dressing them, however, in the luxurious fabric of the chromatic harmony, orchestration, and symphonic development prevalent in the art music contemporary to his time.) Indeed, all the key Delius personality traits reveal themselves with gusto during his brief but eventful Danville stay: his love of sport (riding horses with Colonel Robert Wilson at Dan’s Hill Plantation); his ease of making and keeping friends (he was an immediate social success, many Danvillians following him long after he left through correspondence or later, newspaper articles); his love of nature (he walked the Dan River dells with his friends Phifer and Hoppe); and the personal charm that women found so agreeable (including the rumored affair with Virginia Watkins). These stories are nicely chronicled in Mary Cahill’s book “Delius in Danville” (published by the Danville Historical Society).
After crossing the Dan River from north Danville (following the commute of our happy trio), we toured many other sites in our Delius odyssey, including the site of the old Roanoke Female College where Delius and Phifer taught (no longer standing), the tobacco district, the site of the old railroad station near Craghead Street where Delius first arrived and departed (no longer standing), and the espresso shop downtown, among others. (Actually, the espresso shop is a recent addition to downtown, and was a pleasant discovery to this coffee drinking northwesterner recently transplanted to the east. Espresso shops are everywhere in the northwest.) We even had a chance to view the big stone piers of the antebellum Richmond and Danville railroad bridge, crossed by Delius when arriving in September, 1885 (and 20 years earlier by Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his Cabinet on April 3, 1865), the breeze blowing pleasantly up from the Dan that day. The tour ended with a hilltop view of the Dan River valley.
Musical Legacy of Delius's Danville Experience
While the landscape and indigenous music of Florida and Virginia, as discussed above, were an inspiration to Delius and key to his development as a composer, there were other very important musical consequences bearing on his future resulting from his Danville stay.
Shortly after arriving, Delius met professor Robert Phifer, Head of Music at Roanoke Female College, who became his friend and mentor and who was instrumental in securing him a teaching appointment at the College. Phifer, educated in Europe's premier music conservatory at Leipzig, Germany, must have sensed Frederick's gifts and encouraged the young composer to continue seeking his way by the academic path. They had much in common, and as Mrs. Phifer recalled: "There was not a day passed that he did not find his way to our house, taking meals with us, telling jokes, amusing my children, and always scribbling music which no one could play but himself."
Delius went to the Leipzig conservatory, and made there one of the more important musical contacts of his life, Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, who's advocacy on his behalf helped persuade his father to regard the young Frederick's musical prospects in a more positive light. The rich musical life of Leipzig also offered Delius the opportunity of hearing some of the finest music making in Europe (Mahler conducted there), seeding his young fertile mind with the musical experiences necessary for his future growth as a composer. And for the price of a barrel of beer Delius heard his "Florida Suite" (conducted by Hans Sitt at Bonorand's restaurant in the Rosenthal Park), the first time he could hear the effects of his orchestration--an experience so crucial to his artistic development since he was essentially a composer who thought in terms of the orchestra.
Delius didn't attend the Leipzig conservatory on Phifer's word alone, but Phifer's voice may have been a more compelling one, for as soon as he leaves Danville in the summer of 1886, we find him in Leipzig the following fall.
And as a music teacher in Danville, the only time Delius taught music in his life, he was compelled to digest his music lessons from Thomas Ward in Florida (another story) and from previous study and experience (Delius had piano and violin lessons in earlier years), thus establishing an important foundation for his future work--important even if that foundation, as it turned out, consisted of identifying only a few principles and a limited amount of literature within musical tradition that could be of use to him, jettisoning the rest after thoughtful review. His experiences in Leipzig continued this process.
The Second Visit of 1897
The circumstances of Delius’s second visit to Danville and the New World in 1897 are somewhat fantastic, having the character of comic opera. This is in keeping with the romantic streak coloring the various episodes of his life (though a life not untouched, I might add, by difficulty and some tragedy).
After Danville, Delius obtained familial consent for a course of musical studies at the Conservatory in Leipzig, Germany, where in addition to his studies, he hung out with Scandinavian musicians and artists, making acquaintance with the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg. Upon completion of his course, and supported by a small family allowance, he took up residence in Paris for concentrated musical work, spending his summers hiking the hills and mountains of Norway.
What prompted Delius to leave France for a second and final visit to Danville and America probably included a desire to settle affairs at his Florida orange plantation of Solano Grove, potential musical interests in New York with the impresario Victor Thrane, and perhaps a desire to evade the attentions of his mistress Princesse de Cystria. Without the knowledge of Delius and his traveling companion Halfdan Jebe (a Norwegian violinist) she apparently slipped on board their New York bound vessel and announced her presence to them when well out to sea! To explain her presence as a traveling companion in those Victorian times of overt propriety, they assumed the roles of traveling musicians. When arriving in Danville, Jebe became the violinist “Lemmanoff”, and the princess the singer “Madame Donodossola”, with Delius as himself playing piano. When the trio hit Danville, they performed at the Methodist College (or Danville College for Young Ladies) on January 30th, 1897, the Danville Register reviewing the concert the next morning, from which I excerpt: “Mr. Delius was very happy in his accompaniments, and his old friends in the city were pleased to hear the evidence of his talents as a composer in the composition of his which Madame Donodossola so faithfully rendered.” Delius stayed in Danville for a brief time visiting his old friend professor Phifer, the Phifer family, and others before moving on to Florida with Jebe, and perhaps the princess.
Why did Delius visit Danville at this time, since his practical interests lay only in New York and Florida? While a convenient stop between, I submit that he sensed himself on the brink of real maturity as a composer (verifiable by his output), and was revisiting scenes from his past as a symbolic gesture of farewell before beginning a new chapter in his life. He had a genuine interest in seeing old friends as well. Indeed, as late as 1910 he sent Robert Phifer a piano score of his Appalachia autographed "To my old Danville friend...from Frederick Delius".
The Delius Festival of 1997
Commemorating the event of Delius’s 1897 visit, the 1997 Delius Festival of May 29 - June 1, 1997 intends to foster appreciation and raise awareness of Frederick Delius and his music. Events include receptions, a Victorian town and country bus tour, historic home tours, lectures, and concerts.
When I visited Danville, imagine my happy surprise at finding the building in which the 1897 concert took place still standing, now part of Stratford College! Yes, a “replication” of that concert will be performed in the building in which it originally took place, with Delius, “Mr. Lemmanoff”, and the Russian princess “Madame Donodossola”. It should be a pleasant evening.
A number of interesting and informative lectures will take place during the Festival. Dr. Lionel Carley, archivist of the Delius Trust, London, will deliver a keynote address, and Dr. Roger Buckley, Editor of the Journal of the Delius Society, and Vice- Chairman of the Society, London, will lecture on the Red Notebook that Delius began in Danville in 1886. Delius’s Florida teacher and mentor, Thomas Ward, will be discussed by Dr. Don Gillespie of C.F. Peters Corporation. Finally, Danville Community College professor C. Kinney Rorrer will describe and play the music of the mid 1880’s that Delius would likely have heard in America. Surely some of the music of “Appalachia” will be discussed and played at this gathering.
Danville can be proud to be hosting this conference with such style. Hats off to the organizing committee! And the city can be proud to have had a role in shaping the development of one of music’s most unique and individual composers of genius: Frederick Delius. Admittedly, this music isn’t for everyone, but for those who enjoy it, it offers rare rewards indeed. I’m looking forward to a return visit in May.
About the Author
Michael R. Ridderbusch (1961- ) is a native of the Northwest United States and was educated at Western Washington University and the University of Washington, receiving degrees in music and librarianship. He's currently Assistant Curator at the West Virginia and Regional History Collection, West Virginia University.
e-mail: mridder@wvnvm.wvnet.edu
Part 2 of this Article: Sidebars