Ask a Floridian about a favorite Florida piece of music, and it is the rare person who will mention the Florida Suite, by Frederick Delius, the English composer. While Frederick Delius gets occasional airplay on classical stations across the U.S., he is as far as you can get from fame.
That is changing. Of late, Delius (1862-1934) has had a bit of a revival, thanks to an unlikely source. In the last two years, his four-movement work, the 1887 Florida Suite, has been on heavy rotation on the London classical station Classic FM. The station is heard worldwide through the app Global Player.
Delius wrote Florida Suite in Leipzig, in 1887. The symphony was a reflection of his time in Florida, where he lived for two years from 1884-86, trying to manage his father’s 100-acre orange grove in Solano Grove, south of Jacksonville.
As inspiration for the symphony, he is said to have heard the singing of freed slaves, just two decades after emancipation, while sitting on the porch. He tried to figure out how to express what he saw and heard in music.
“Hearing their singing in such romantic surroundings, it was then and there that I first felt the urge to express myself in music,” he was reported to have said by his friend, and fellow composer, Eric Fenby.
He trained in Jacksonville under a Jesuit church organist, Thomas Ward, where he learned counterpoint and composition. Delius later said that the instruction was the only lessons “from which I ever derived any benefit.”
While the music is easy to listen to, and has popular appeal, it is so easy to hear that it often did not get the attention of classical stations, which favored classical music from much earlier times, or more challenging works. Delius was inspired by Edvard Grieg, the Norwegian composer, who also used folk music as a base for his more complex compositions. Grieg was all about trying to evoke a place and time, in his case Norway, norse gods and Scandinavian peasant dances.
Critics are now trying to sort out what sort of musician Delius was. In 2019, the critic Jolanta Szulakowska of the Academy of Music in Krakow, Poland, put him as a “romantic sensual impressionism” belonging to the Victorian sentimental realism of the time, as opposed to any sort of modern movement. Szulakowska would have been in the vein of the English painters of his era, not Europeans, as he was connected to “artists and composers who wanted to connect old folk-songs and to use them in their artwork.”
Szulakowska believes that the time in Florida defined Delius’s musical career, through the entirety of which America continued to inspire him. A century before Disney explored African and African-American themes, Delius wrote the opera “Koanga”, about an African prince and voodoo priest who was made a slave in Louisiana. He also wrote Appalachia & the Song of the High Hills.
Much of his work would not have survived if it had not been for fellow composer Eric Fenby, who transcribed the work when he suffered from syphilis, blind and paralyzed.
His revival in Florida, as a piece of history, came about when his small cabin was moved to Jacksonville University. In 1961, Mrs. Henry L. Richmond deeded the house and site to the university, where a historical marker says that the house was to be a museum of Deliana, objects related to his life. The London-based Delius Trust assisted with the reconstruction.
There have been all manner of Delius events in Jacksonville through the years, as his notoriety has increased and decreased, depending upon the musical trends. A 1968 black and white BBC 35mm film tells the story of his later years, with a creepy, blind Delius in sunglasses dictating music to Fenby and being spoon fed soup and beer. Delius’ suffering from syphilis, contracted somehow in Paris, was debilitating. Quite odd.
In 1996, Delius’s story in Florida was revived by a University of Georgia professor, Don Gillespie. Gillespie helped to rediscover the story, yet again by searching for information about Ward, his Florida teacher. Delius’ myth has been enhanced, as he allegedly fathered a son with a local black woman named Chloe. Fans have searched for the child but haven’t found anyone.
YouTube has also been a boon for Delius’s music, as his work has been easily available for all. One comment puts it quite well: “Headline: Florida man writes classical music. It’s underrated.”
