Frederick Delius (b. 1862, Bradford, Yorkshire; d. 1934, Grez-sur-Loing, France)

As a child, Frederick Delius played piano and violin and fell in love with the music of Chopin and Grieg. He left school at age 16. He spent a few years in the United States trying to make a living teaching music, then moved to Leipzig, where he worked with Grieg. In 1888 he moved to Paris and began composing operas. Famous friends there included Strindberg and Gauguin. He discovered Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, which became his gospel. In 1899 he retired to Grez-sur-Loing, living the remainder of his life in relative seclusion.

Delius was strongly influenced by the music of Claude Debussy and is considered to have developed an original version of Debussy’s impressionistic style. Delius particularly liked the French composer’s floating, suspended sense of tonality and the exaltation of timbre as a basic means of musical expression.

In 1900 he composed A Village Romeo and Juliet, his fifth and best-known opera. Delius wrote two more operas, short orchestral pieces, works for chorus and orchestra, concertos, fifty songs, a few unaccompanied choruses, and a very few keyboard pieces. The reclusive composer was plagued by paralysis and blindness. After around 1920 he dictated his music to a fan, Eric Fenby.