The Walk to the Paradise Garden

CHAN 10913 X – DELLIUS

Delius: Orchestral Works

The Walk to the Paradise Garden

Nature in all her manifestations as well as the rhythmic vitality and variety of the dance were two potent sources of inspiration on Delius, as heard on this CD. The North Country Sketches evokes a favourite landscape as well as the cycle of the seasons; In a Summer Garden celebrates Delius’s own garden, whilst ‘The Walk to the Paradise Garden’ portrays an imaginary landscape, the journey of a pair of lovers from the high summer of their dreams to the autumnal reality of their fate. It is one of Delius’s most popular short works, and forms an orchestral interlude between the last two scenes of the opera A Village Romeo and Juliet, which he composed between 1899 and 1901, although the interlude was not added until 1907, prior to the opera’s premiere. The opera describes the tragedy of Sali and Vreli who fall in love despite the rivalry between their feuding fathers, which ruins both families. Penniless and homeless, the youngsters wander in pursuit of happiness, only to realise that their search is in vain. A mysterious character, the Dark Fiddler (arguably a symbol of death), advises them to seek the Paradise Garden.

Their journey is depicted in music suffused with the longing of the lovers, their nostalgia for former happier times, and also the hopelessness of their situation. Having reached the Paradise Garden, they decide that to die in the intensity of their love is preferable to poverty and wretchedness. The lovers climb into a barge; as they embrace, it floats down-river and sinks. This passionate, sensual music surely epitomises Delius’s belief that ‘music is an outburst of the soul’.

A Dance Rhapsody, No. 1

Throughout the music of Delius dance rhythms are found in abundance, particularly those in triple time, and a number of his works refer overtly to dance in their titles, for example the two dance rhapsodies. A Dance Rhapsody, No. 1 was composed in 1908; Delius himself conducted the premiere in 1909 at the Hereford Three Choirs Festival and it became one of his most performed pieces during his lifetime. It is cast in a variation form similar to that of the orchestral rhapsody Brigg Fair, written the year before. The dance theme is hardly altered the whole way through, although its character changes as it journeys through different keys and rhythmic alterations. The middle section is more rhapsodic; it features a violin solo and introduces new ideas that gradually reveal their kinship to the principal dance theme.

A Dance Rhapsody, No. 2

The rhythm of the mazurka forms the basis for A Dance Rhapsody, No. 2, written in 1916, and Delius isolates fragments from the flute’s opening theme to develop the work. A new oboe theme is introduced in the central section, accompanied by delicate, luminous scoring for harp, celesta, and strings. Although the Rhapsody was first performed in 1923, Sir Thomas Beecham, with typical immodesty, asserted that his performance at the Delius Festival of 1929 was the true première. Before conducting it, he addressed the audience:

the next work we are going to play is the least known of Delius’s orchestral works... This is not strange for, though this unfortunate work has been given on several occasions, it has not yet been heard at all! You will now hear the first performance!

In a Summer Garden

The fantasy In a Summer Garden is undoubtedly one of Delius’s finest masterworks. Composed the same year as the First Dance Rhapsody (1908), it was first performed under Thomas Beecham the same year; Delius subsequently revised it and the première of the final version was given in New York in 1912 under Josef Stansky.

Their garden, at the home of Delius and his wife in Grez-sur-Loing near Fontainebleau, was renowned for its luxuriance during summer, as recalled by Eric Fenby:

The high stone walls of the garden sloped down beyond the orchard to the river. In summer the white courtyard would blaze with myriad flowers, and nature rim the Delius’s little world by the great trees at the water’s edge. Indoors... paintings on the walls revealed colourful studies of the garden in a summer mood from the brush of his talented wife, Jelka. But the garden itself was her masterpiece, and the musical imagery it worked on her husband’s mind was dedicated fittingly to her.

Delius himself described what he had in mind whilst composing the fantasy:

Roses, lilies and a thousand sweet-scented flowers. Bright butterflies flitting from petal to petal, and gold brown bees murmuring in the warm, quivering summer air. Beneath the shade of the old tree flows a quiet river with water-lilies. In a boat, almost hidden, two people. A thrush is singing in the distance.

The music is like a sequence of rapidly changing impressions that vividly evoke Delius’s images; indeed, one can almost see the riot of colour and smell the Gloire de Dijon roses that massed on the walls of the house. The tiny fragment heard on the oboe within seconds of the opening is a pervasive thread through the work, which has at its centre a magical interlude in which the warm, sensuous melody of the violas and languid woodwind ostinati suggest the lazy current of the river. When the climax is reached it is riven with ecstasy as well as sadness, with the knowledge that such beauty is fleeting and must fade. Above all, In a Summer Garden is a love-song, enshrining all that Jelka meant to Delius, as witnessed, too, in the lines of Christina Rossetti, which prefaced the score:

All are my blooms, and all sweet blooms of love,

To thee I gave while spring and summer sang.

North Country Sketches

Although Delius lived most of his life in France, he retained a love for the landscape of his boyhood, the moors and dales of Yorkshire, and the North Country Sketches is his evocation of them. Begun in 1913, the work was completed the following year and received its first performance, under Beecham, in 1915. Together with Brigg Fair, the work shares the distinction of being Delius’s only orchestral composition to have its roots in an English landscape. In his book on Delius, published in 1923, Philip Heseltine included the recollections of the composer of his Yorkshire childhood:

We lived in a house called Claremont, Horton Lane, which was, at that time, out of town and on the edge of the moors, on the road that leads to Bingley. We children had two ponies and I loved riding over the moors to Ilkley – then only a tiny village – where we often spent the summer.

It is these memories of the moors that Delius recalls in this work. The bleak austerity of autumn and winter are conveyed in the first two movements: sinewy chromatic phrases are suggestive of the wind whistling through barren trees in ‘The Wind Soughs in the Trees’, and rustling ostinati are indicative of the austere, silent, cold ‘Winter Landscape’. The ‘Dance’ suggested to Heseltine a gathering around the mid-winter fire and ‘a spell of fireside musing over the past, a tale within a tale’, whilst ‘The March of Spring’, marked to be played ‘with a light, lively and throbbing movement’, portrays the sap rising with the turn of the year.