Palsgaard: History and Musical Heritage

by Lionel Carley

Palsgaard Castle, on the eastern coast of Jutland and overlooking the straits between the mainland and Fyn, originally dated from the second half of the 13th century. In a relatively short time it became evident that its closeness to the shore rendered it susceptible to attacks by sea. The decision was therefore taken to dismantle the fortification and rebuild it on a more secure site about a mile inland. Early in the 15th century a second move was made to the nearby site of today’s manor house (still called Palsgaard Slot, or Castle).

Of that early 15th century castle all that remains are the extensive vaulted cellars, although much of the house above must have been constructed from the materials of the demolished castle. The site was protected by a moat and a drawbridge, and the great house, a product of safer times and a dwindling need for fortifications, became the home over the next 500 years of a series of distinguished Danish families. In 1804 and 1805 two side wings were added and the house largely took on its present configuration.

A number of striking names are connected to Palsgaard’s chequered history. The original castle may well have seen the regicide Stig Andersen, immortalised in music in Peter Heise’s opera Drot og Marsk (The King and the Marshal). This was given its first performance outside Denmark for 90 years in London in 1997, a curious fate given that Grove describes it as ‘the most significant Danish opera of the [19th] century’. Such Danish families as the Rosenkrantzes and the Gyllensterns – names more familiar to us than that of Stig Andersen – were associated with Palsgaard in its early years. The Reedtz family entered as far back as 1665 into its long tenure of the manor. One scion was Holger Christian Reedtz, lord of the manor from 1835 to his death in 1857 and Danish Foreign Minister from 1850-51.

The last owner before the era of Einar and Elizabeth Schou was the Norwegian diplomat, Baron Frederik Wedel Jarlsberg (1855-1942). Buying the estate in 1898, he had the grounds expensively re-landscaped by specialist British gardeners. During his ten year’s tenure, Palsgaard played its last significant political role, for Wedel Jarlsberg hosted negotiations there that ultimately brought the Danish Prince Carl (as Haakon VII) to the new throne of Norway after its independence from Sweden in 1905. Part of the house became known as the Royal Wing – earlier the Crown Prince of Sweden had also stayed there.

Einar and Elisabeth Schou

Einar Viggo Schou was born in Copenhagen in 1866. Thirty years on he would be managing director of the largest margarine factory in the world, in the west London suburb of Southall. And twelve years later, his fortune was to buy him the manor of Palsgaard.

The Southall factory was special in many respects. Supplying one-third of England’s requirement of margarine, it funded enterprising research laboratories and provided excellent conditions of employment, in sharp contrast to those endured by most of the working population in industrial Victorian England. There was a large building on the factory site for the recreation of all staff, with a library, reading-rooms, a 1,000-seat theatre and a sports ground.

Einar Schou travelled frequently between England and Denmark. One journey took him, in 1899, to Copenhagen, where he married a cousin, the gifted Elisabeth Döcker. Schou himself, like his wife, was drawn to art and literature, but as a trained singer Elisabeth was to add a musical dimension to the partnership. For the next decade their villa in Ealing became a meeting-place for expatriate and visiting Danes of note.

The Schou family at Palsgaard

In 1908 Einar bought the idyllic Palsgaard estate: some 3,300 acres stretching to the sea-shore. He remodelled the terrace behind the house; constructed hothouses; and on the landward side built a small industrial estate, carefully screened by trees. Although nowhere on the scale of his English factories, it was endowed with productive laboratories and provided model conditions for the workforce. Schou’s own inventions in connection with emulsifying procedures are still in use, and the concern, Palsgaard Emulsion, prospers to this day, with subsidiaries around the world.

In the Schous’ visitors book, a number of signatures catch the eye. They include Peter Alfred Schou, Einar’s uncle, a well known Danish painter, some of whose paintings, depicting both Denmark and England, hang on the walls at Palsgaard. E M Forster visited for three days in the summer of 1926.

Palsgaard became the Schous’ main home for the rest of their lives. They had two children, Herbert and Gertrud. Einar died there at only 59, in 1925. He had remained a kindly, modest, enlightened man, and what he had achieved for his workers in England at Palsgaard was mirrored in his – and his wife’s – generosity in the locality, an area that included the little town of Juelsminde. They even built a church there, a gentle whitewashed building of Danish calm and beauty, where their joint grave may be seen in the churchyard.

Elisabeth died at Palsgaard in 1952 at the age of 79. Just under six years later, her son Herbert established the Schou Foundation, which now runs the estate. The director is Knud Brix, who lives at Palsgaard manor with his wife Birthe.

Music at Palsgaard

Elisabeth Schou’s singing teachers were artists of real distinction. She studied abroad for a time with Jean de Reszke and then in Copenhagen with Vilhelm Herold. She evidently had a fine voice: she sang in Copenhagen in a number of public concerts as well as in the Wagner Society. Whether she continued such activities in London is unknown. She was then, after all, the wife of a leading industrialist with a household to run, children to bring up and guests to entertain. Although Palsgaard brought responsibilities on a much wider basis, amateur music would certainly have continued there, but Elizabeth was never to become a fully fledged professional singer.

A decisive step in her musical life came in 1920, when she was largely responsible for founding the Danish Philharmonic Society, contributing generously to it for the next few years. One of her co-founders was the Danish conductor and composer Paul von Klenau, a close friend of the family. Part of the story of her intimate connections with the mainstream of Danish musical life is shown in the collection of photographs preserved at Palsgaard or in the collection of her granddaughter, Kirsten Mehlsen, who lives in Juelsminde. There are photographs inscribed by the pianist Frederic Lamond, the soprano Berta Morena and the tenor Peter Cornelius. The Polish soprano Marya Freund dedicates her portrait ‘à l’amie des artistes Madame Schou’. Freund was a noted exponent of the avant-garde, giving performances of works by, among others, Kodály, Milhaud, Prokofiev, Ravel, Satie, Schönberg and Stravinsky. Significantly, there is a photograph inscribed ‘to Herr and Frau E Schou with sincere gratitude for the lovely time in Copenhagen in February 1923’. Until I visited Palsgaard in August 1996 this portrait had remained unrecognised, its inscription and signature of ‘Arnold Schönberg’ undeciphered.

But it is the visitors book that provides the richest yield: Frederick Delius and his wife Jelka in 1909 (and in 1915); Frederic Austin, English composer and baritone singer (usually together with his wife) in 1909, 1913, 1929, 1933 and 1935; Herman Sandby the Danish ’cellist; Paul von Klenau; Herbert Withers the English ’cellist; Berta Morena; Johanne Stockmarr, the Danish pianist; Ellen Gulbranson, the Swedish/Norwegian mezzo-soprano; Emil Telmanyi, the Danish conductor and violinist, with his second wife, who was a professional pianist (his first marriage had been to Carl Nielsen’s daughter Anne Marie); Georg Vásárhelyi, the Hungarian-born pianist; and Ignaz Friedman, the Polish pianist. Elisabeth Schou’s singing teacher, Vilhelm Herold, was a frequent visitor.

Elisabeth also had a talent for translation. In 1918 she drafted a letter to Lilli Lehmann asking if she might have the honour of translating her How to Sing into Danish, and two notebooks in Elisabeth’s hand contain a significant part of her version of the work. There is no evidence that it was published, but during the 1930s and 40s there emerged published translations of Cecil Roberts, Katherine Mansfield, Frances Hodgson Burnett and others from the English, and further books from the French and German, including a children’s story by Rudolf Binding. Delius met Binding in Frankfurt in the winter of 1922-23: at a chamber concert there celebrating Delius’s birthday, one of the composer’s Verlaine songs was sung in Binding’s specially prepared German translation.

Frederick Delius at Palsgaard

While they were in London, Einar and Elisabeth Schou had become particularly friendly with two composers. Frederick Delius and Frederic Austin themselves first met in 1907, and it seems likely that the Schous’ friendship with them also dates from around that time. It was the year of Delius’s breakthrough in England, when his Piano Concerto and Appalachia were first given there, in October and November respectively, at the Queen’s Hall. Frederic Austin had had his first orchestral success with his Rhapsody: Spring given at a Queen’s Hall Promenade concert under Henry Wood on 16 October; Delius’s Piano Concerto followed at the Proms just six days later. Elisabeth Schou could well have been at either or both of these concerts.

It was not as a composer that Austin had come to Delius’s attention earlier that year, but as a singer. This we know from a letter written by Delius to his wife – from London – on 21 April: ‘There is a splendid baritone here, a Mr Austin, very musical & I hope he will sing Sea-drift at Sheffield and later the "Messe".’ Austin was indeed to sing in the first English performance of Sea Drift, given in Delius’s presence at the Sheffield Festival in October 1908. And we do know that by this time the Schous had become acquainted with Delius, for he is invited by Elisabeth Schou to dinner at Ealing on 12 October. A letter from Elisabeth, written in English on notepaper headed TORRENS HOUSE, NORTH COMMON ROAD, EALING, W, just one day before the event, indicates that the composer – probably because of the short notice, is unable to accept:

We are both very disappointed that you cannot come tomorrow but shall be looking forward to the month of December, which brings you back to London. – I cannot resist telling you a strange coincidence: – I was rung up yesterday by Miss Ellen Beck and Miss Stockmarr – (our first singer and pianist in Denmark) asking if they might come out tomorrow – of course the excitement was great when they heard you were coming, and they [sic] disappointment will not be less great. I wonder if you have heard Ellen Beck – she is singing at Queens Hall on Wednesday. –

I am taking the liberty of sending you a danish book, where you will find the latest essay written about J.P. Jacobsen. – You need not trouble to return it. –

Au revoir à bientôt

The book in question was Jacobsen’s Digte og Udkast (Poems and Sketches) and Delius sent to Elisabeth from Grez in December a brief note of thanks and greetings in Danish. Jacobsen was, of course, one of his favourite poets: he had earlier set some of his songs and was about to engage on an operatic treatment of the poet’s great novel Niels Lyhne, duly to become Fennimore and Gerda. Doubtless he had discussed Jacobsen’s works with Elisabeth, and her first invitation to visit the newly-acquired Palsgaard must have dated from this time. She would have been aware of the potential stimulus of the location for the composer.

One of Delius’s Danish friends was Helge Rode, whose play Dansen Gaar (The Dance Goes On) had inspired Delius’s tone poem Life’s Dance. He had also composed songs to words by Hans Christian Andersen and Ludvig Holstein, and furthermore he had made five settings of Drachmann’s poems. But it was to Jacobsen that he was to return for his final Danish setting, producing in 1911 the masterly An Arabesque.

Back in London in June 1909 for the English première of A Mass of Life, Delius had hoped that Elisabeth might be present, as a letter dated 10 June 1909 that she wrote in Danish on Palsgaard notepaper reveals:

It was more than a disappointment to me to be away from London and your concert last Monday. – I just now received an enthusiastic account of it – both as regards the music and your success. – Imagine, I had the tickets and then had to be content to send representatives. – Now I hope you will keep your promise and come to Denmark this summer with your wife – and when you come to Palsgaard it will give me a special pleasure to continue the homage with flowers and "curtain-calls", – which I unfortunately could not take part in the other evening.–

We live an utterly idyllic life here in the country – birdsong and flowers – the lowing of cows – instead of motor horns – and the frogs’ chorus in the evenings – light nights with lovely light effects!

This is just to remind you of a promise – which I hope was not given frivolously – but with the real intention of keeping it. –

Au revoir – greetings from Denmark – Palsgaard – and from

Einar and Elisabeth Schou

The Deliuses soon made up their minds. Denmark and Palsgaard it was to be, although Delius himself was first to take a walking holiday in the Black Forest with friend and fellow-composer Norman O’Neill. Problems were, however, to intervene, principally in the form of bouts of influenza to which both Jelka and Delius fell prey that summer. Delius was sufficiently recovered, however, in time for the Black Forest trip. ‘All this,’ he wrote to Jelka from Feldberg, ‘is nothing to Denmark & Norway & I believe sea bathing will do us both good.’ Jelka was still unwell and evidently had reservations about travelling, but Delius reassured her:

If we don’t like it at Schous we will go on to Thisted and stay in a small bathing place – write to Mrs Schou and tell her we arrive on Aug 1st 4 pm at Horsens [ i.e. the most convenient station] – I hope we are not infectious – Austin’s children are also there.

One of the children was Richard Austin, who would later share conducting duties with Beecham at the Delius Festival of 1946.

Delius was hoping to meet some other old friends in Denmark. He had written to Grieg’s widow, Nina, and she had replied that she would be in the south of Denmark in August. But this was too far away for them to make the journey from Palsgaard. The Deliuses also just missed Grainger, who had to stay in London in August, but would then be in the north of Jutland. Already an enthusiast for Denmark, Grainger had many good Danish friends, and his lover was Karen Holten, a distant cousin of present-day composer and conductor Bo Holten. Did Grainger ever see Palsgaard? He certainly knew Jutland well, and could converse with Jutish country people in their own language when he was out collecting folk-songs with the leading Danish collector Evald Tang Kristensen, who lived in Vejle, some 30 miles away.

Although little detail has been found that records that month-long holiday at Palsgaard in August 1909, it is not difficult to imagine the gentle activities of the time. There would have been excursions to the seaside, and perhaps to the nearby towns of Horsens and Vejle; perhaps, too, as far as to Aarhus, some 40 miles to the north. There would have been boating and bathing, walking and riding, and not least the making of music in Palsgaard’s beautiful and spacious drawing room; perhaps there were outdoor games with little Richard and Freda Austin and Bertie and Gertrud Schou.

It seems likely that during this time Delius was checking the score and freshly-copied parts of the first Dance Rhapsody, sent to Palsgaard at Delius’s request by Frederic Austin’s brother Ernest, himself a composer but now scarce-remembered. Of course, Delius was still at work on Fennimore and Gerda, and one can imagine that the Palsgaard setting must have been inspirational in respect of this profoundly Danish work. The evening sea, glimpsed through the trees from the house, glistening; the few flickering lights of the little ferry town of Juelsminde; the gently rolling landscape gradually being enveloped in warm summer darkness – these things are redolent of the Fennimore setting, at once physically and psychologically. The atmosphere of the place seems to take one into the opera’s sound-world, and one feels that something of Fennimore at least must have germinated there. Delius and Austin each penned two bars of music in the visitors book at the end of their stay, Delius to the words ‘Deilige Sommer, deilige Sted’ (Lovely summer, lovely place) and Austin to ‘Herlige Mennesker, deilige Fred’ (Splendid people, lovely peace and quiet).

The Schous and Deliuses remained in friendly contact, though further letters have not come down to us. In June the following year, for example, Jelka helped to engage a French girl in Paris as a maidservant for Palsgaard. A second successive summer holiday there was planned, but Delius fell ill and had to spend several weeks in a Swiss sanatorium. Jelka wrote to him on 27 June:

I had a nice letter from Mrs Schou – she will not yet give up hoping for our visit; they had all looked forward to it so much. She asked for your address, which I’m sending, as she wants to send you some books.

Delius, however, was worried at having lost so much working time, and the summer was spent at home in Grez instead. It was to be more than six years before he again took up the Schous’ ever-open invitation. Now war had started, and although the Deliuses spent most of it at Grez, 1915 was an exception. After several months in England and Norway, they arrived at Palsgaard on 9 October, and Delius wrote to Philip Heseltine three days later: ‘I feel rather more settled down ... we intend staying in this lovely place a month or perhaps 2 ... everything is autumn colored & we are quite close to the Fjord.’ On 21 October a picture-postcard of ‘Palsgaard Slot’ was despatched to Percy Grainger’s mother in New York, Jelka writing, ‘I want to send you a ‘hilsen’ from lovely old Palsgaard!’

In spite of the warmth of their welcome and the invitation to stay on at Palsgaard and then in Copenhagen, the Deliuses were growing desperately homesick for Grez after almost a year’s absence. They left Palsgaard for the last time at the end of the month, and after a few days in Copenhagen set out on the difficult wartime journey for home.

Curiously, the visitors book does not record this stay, but a musical memento remains in the house: a copy manuscript in Jelka’s hand of Delius’s setting of Herrick’s ‘To Daffodils’. Its dating of March 1915 no doubt refers to the month of its composition.

The last reference to the Schous in the extant Delius correspondence dates from 1919. Delius, in England at the time, writes home on 23 July to Jelka:

I received your card this morning & also a letter to you from Mrs Schou which I will keep for you as it is long: she enclosed a cutting which will astonish and please you. Just fancy "Fennimore and Gerda" to be given in September in Frankfurt!! what a surprise.

Neither the cutting nor Elisabeth’s letter has survived, but an educated guess would suggest that Paul von Klenau, active both in Frankfurt and Copenhagen, saw to it that a Danish paper was first with the news of this ‘Danish’ opera and its imminent performance. Might it have been this that first sparked off the enduring friendship between Klenau and Elisabeth Schou? On 30 July Klenau’s name first appears in the Palsgaard visitors book. Perhaps he himself had written the notice, and perhaps the Schous consequently invited him to come and tell them all about it.

Frederic Austin at Palsgaard

Frederic Austin, ten years younger than Delius, had studied singing and composition with Charles Lunn and Dr W H Hunt, his own uncle. His breakthrough as a singer came at the Gloucester Three Choirs Festival in 1904, and his début at Covent Garden followed in 1908 when he sang Gunther in The Ring under Richter. From that time on his fine baritone voice was much in demand, both at home and on the continent. He sang regularly at Beecham’s opera seasons. Austin was also a composer, and for a number of years his orchestral works were frequently performed. He was, however, to remain best known for his re-orchestration and re-harmonisation of The Beggar’s Opera, which from June 1920 had an uninterrupted run in London of some three and a half years – a total of 1463 performances.

The Austin-Delius connection began in 1907. So, possibly, did the friendship between Austin and the Schous. But the first piece of evidence clearly linking them comes in the form of a concert programme dating from 1908, found at Palsgaard, suggesting that Elisabeth Schou, at least, was present at a recital in London’s Bechstein Hall of Cyril Scott’s compositions. Austin had sung, and the composer had been at the piano.

Frederic Austin and his family made the first of several visits to Palsgaard in the summer of 1909, when the Deliuses were also there. Four years later, in August 1913, Austin was to return, his visit confirmed by two musical quotations in the visitors’ book, as well as by a slightly more substantial memento. This took the form of an autograph manuscript entitled ‘Engagement’s-Anniversary-Celebrations March’ for piano, inscribed ‘To my friends Einar & Elisabeth Schou’. It is signed, and dated ‘Aug 10th 1913’, and the three-page manuscript, plus title-page, remains at Palsgaard to this day. Even more substantial as a memoir of this second visit, though, is the manuscript of an orchestral suite composed soon after. Later published by the London firm of Chester, the undated autograph score was evidently a gift from Austin to his hosts, presumably conveyed to Palsgaard on one of his later visits. It is inscribed ‘To Einar and Elisabeth Schou – remembering the happy times spent in their delightful country’.

‘Palsgaard’, Danish Sketches for Orchestra, a four-movement suite, was first performed at a Royal Philharmonic Society Concert on 11 December 1916. The venue was the Queen’s Hall and the conductor was Thomas Beecham. The work was favourably, if briefly, reviewed by Musical Opinion and The Musical Times, the former noting: ‘Mr. Austin is a fluent and generally unaffected writer, and this little suite should be heard again.’ I know of two further performances, the first on 9 April 1933 at the Queen’s Hall, with Beecham conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and the second on 6 December of that year at the Bournemouth Pavilion, the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra being conducted by Dan Godfrey.

After a break of sixteen years, Austin was back at Palsgaard in 1929, again accompanied by his wife Amy and – for the first time – his ’cellist friend Herbert Withers, solo ’cellist in Beecham’s orchestra and formerly a student and subsequently a professor at the Royal Academy of Music. In the early 1930s he was to edit the solo part of Delius’s Cello Concerto, as well as that of Delius’s Caprice and Elegy in its ’cello and piano version.

Once again a memento, dated 13 August 1929, is left behind by Austin – the manuscript of a little, untitled song celebrating a Schou family birthday. It should also be mentioned that one further Austin song survives at Palsgaard: a setting of Shakespeare’s ‘It was a lover and his lass’. It is undated, and not in the composer’s hand.

The Austins were back, again with Withers, in August 1933. In a letter written on the 31st from Palsgaard to his daughter Freda Lee-Browne, Austin reports that both his wife Amy and Bertie Withers have left for home. He himself has to stay on, as he is entering into negotiations with the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen with a view to a production of The Beggar’s Opera.

How much you’d enjoy it here, now that you’ve ‘grown up’! In the wonderful weather that we’ve been having, it has been more delightful than can easily be said, continually beautiful, morning, noon & night. What a place to settle down in and work –

He was off to dine that evening at Herbert Schou’s home, where there was a good radio and where he would be able to hear a BBC broadcast of the incidental music he had written for a play. He had meanwhile been interviewed in Copenhagen for Berlingske Tidende, the leading Danish newspaper, on the subject of The Beggar’s Opera [19 August 1933]. In the course of the interview he expressed the hope of a broadcast on Danish Radio during the coming winter season of his Palsgaard Suite, written, as he told the paper, twenty years earlier. ‘It was dedicated to my friends the landowner Schou and his wife, whom I have known since the time they lived in England.’ He and Elisabeth Schou, he added, would be travelling back to Palsgaard the following day.

Austin’s fifth and seemingly final visit to Palsgaard came just two years later, in August 1935. Once again, Withers was there too. Five bars of music written by Austin in the visitors book bear what was to be his valedictory superscription: The wood by the sea – Palsgaard.

Paul von Klenau

The final link in this particular Danish-British chain is supplied by Paul von Klenau. He was born in Copenhagen, but his most significant studies were undertaken from 1902 on in Germany, where – apart from the two periods of European wars – he spent much of his life; so that the Danes have tended to consider him far less one of their own than most of his Danish contemporaries. He composed a whole series of works, including operas, symphonies and, perhaps surprisingly, a tone poem for orchestra (with voice or voices) dating from 1922 entitled Bank Holiday – Souvenir of Hampstead Heath.

From the later perspective of his conducting, in the 1920s, of a number of Delius’s larger works, his studies in Stuttgart in 1908 with Delius’s friend Max Schillings and his participation in the German Tonkünstlerfest of that year in Munich take on a particular interest. Schillings was a leading figure in the Allgemeine Deutsche Musikverein and he programmed the major part of Delius’s A Mass of Life in the 1908 festival; also on the festival’s programme was Klenau’s First Symphony. For both composers, these were first performances, and it would seem almost inconceivable that they did not meet and speak at the time. Indeed it may well have been Klenau’s presence at the performance of the Mass that fired his enthusiasm for Delius’s great work in the first place and led him to grasp at the opportunity to conduct it himself many years later.

By 1913 at the latest, Delius had got to know Klenau’s brother-in-law Heinrich Simon, a wealthy Frankfurt newspaper proprietor and music lover, who that year wrote the original text for Delius’s Requiem, on which composition was begun in the summer. (Klenau had married Anne Marie Simon in Berlin in 1903.) What is certain is that Klenau himself and Delius were in directly touch in May 1914, as Klenau, now conducting in Freiburg, proposed to produce A Village Romeo and Juliet there during the following season. But, as with so many other major Delius performances lined up in Germany, promising golden years indeed for the composer, the war called a halt to the project.

In October 1919, Fennimore and Gerda in Frankfurt brought Delius and Klenau together again, although the latter would simply have been in the audience at the première. Klenau had visited Palsgaard in the summer and was to return there several times in 1920. In March 1920 he wrote a song – ‘Jeg elsker Dig – Du unge Brud’ (‘I love you – young bride’) – which he dedicated to Gertrud Schou and Ebbe Andersen on the occasion of their wedding. Listed as a co-founder of the Danish Philharmonic Society, Klenau would no doubt have discussed with Elisabeth Schou matters relating to the Society during his further visits to Palsgaard that year. He frequently conducted the Society’s concerts in Copenhagen during the 1920s, even though his main activities as a conductor would appear to have been in Vienna, Frankfurt and elsewhere in Europe during the inter-war years.

Klenau’s Delius concerts were memorable and he would certainly have reported back on them to Elisabeth Schou. The Deliuses spent the winter of 1922-23, studiously watched over by Heinrich Simon and his wife, in Frankfurt, and on 1 March 1923 Klenau conducted an all-Delius concert there - a late birthday celebration for the composer - consisting of North Country Sketches, the Cello Concerto and The Song of the High Hills - all of them German premières. In February 1925 came the Mass of Life in Vienna and then in London, at a Royal Philharmonic Society concert little more than two months later. The Deliuses were unable to attend either performance but learned of rave reviews. Klenau was invited back to London, on the strength of his success with the Mass, the following year, conducting Delius’s Eventyr at a Royal Philharmonic Society concert. And he was back again in 1927, conducting Paris with the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.

I do not know whether Klenau conducted much more Delius, and, if so, where. It is more than likely that he did. There was even a performance of the Mass projected for Paris in 1926, which Delius wanted him to conduct. Klenau paid a visit to Grez-sur-Loing in February of that year, no doubt to discuss the project – which in the event was to be aborted. One concrete result of this visit, however, was the publication of an enthusiastic and intelligent look at Delius’s music entitled ‘The Approach to Delius’ which Klenau published in The Music Teacher in January 1927 (and which enjoyed re-publication in 1976 in A Delius Companion). By then the Scandinavian countries, for so long dear to Delius, were no longer attainable for him. But Einar and Elisabeth Schou and a stately home in Denmark had provided a welcome haven in happier times, and it is only appropriate that this relationship should at last be recorded and celebrated.