Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Delius: Eine Messe des Lebens, Welwood, Cynara

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Every year I devote the last Sunday in August to the music of English composer Frederick Delius (1862-1934) because Delius' impressionistic style is so exquisitely evocative of those lazy, hazy days at the end of summertime. Over the course of three decades of lyric theater broadcasting I have presented several times in cycle the recordings of all of Delius' seven operas.

Delius himself considered his greatest work to be not one of them, but Eine Messe des Lebens ("A Mass of Life," 1909). This paean to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche could never be mistaken for a musical setting of the Roman Catholic Mass. Delius' amanuensis Eric Fenby wrote of him, "Delius was at heart a pagan."

"A Mass of Life" is a secular oratorio conceived on a grand scale like Mahler's symphonies, calling for a gigantic orchestra, even bigger chorus and vocal soloists. Delius selected his text from the most poetic and least polemical passages of Also Sprach Zarathustra. There's nary a hint of Nazi propagandizing in his libretto. Curiously, Hitler's pagan National Socialist regime in Germany never made use of Delius' oratorio for political purposes. Delius' music transcends all politics. The joy of living and love of Nature was what he was extolling in his "Mass."

Way back in April of 1986 I broadcast the old 1953 mono LP recording of "A Mass of Life" with Delius' personal friend and artistic champion Sir Thomas Beecham conducting. Then in April, 1993 came the Intaglio CD issue of a 1971 BBC radio broadcast of the "Mass," under Norman Del Mar's direction. Another big name interpreter of English music, Richard Hickox recorded "A Mass of Life" for the British Chandos label. Hickox lead the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. The Chandos CDs I have aired twice before on Delius Sundays in 1997 and 2011.

The Bournemouth Symphony has made a new recording of the "Mass." It was released on two Naxos CD's in 2012. This time it's David Hill conducting the orchestra, with the Bach Choir, who sing the original German language text of Eine Messe des Lebens, along with five top-notch British vocal soloists. Fanfare magazine's reviewer Adrian Corleonis pronounces the Naxos release "...a superb production and the grandest addition to the Delius discography in many years." (Fanfare, Nov/Dec, 2012.)

Keep listening for a new recording of Delius' choral masterpiece Sea Drift (1904), to the words of Walt Whitman. Baritone Roderick Williams is the baritone soloist, joined by the Halle Orchestra and Chorus directed by Mark Elder. Sea Drift was recorded live in performance in 2011 in Bridge-water Hall, Manchester, England for compact-disc release under the famed orchestra's own label.

Delius was familiar with the exquisite four-stanza poem Cynara by Ernest Dowson (1867-1900). It was inspired by the beautiful semi-divine figure in the Odes of the Roman poet Horace. Cynara is Dowson's finest lyric. Its third stanza contains the phrase "Gone with the wind," taken up as the title of Margaret Mitchell's famous novel. Local composer Arthur Welwood (b. 1934) has set Cynara to music. Welwood scored his setting for soprano voice and piano, with English horn obbligato. Cynara was recorded live in performance in October of 2013 in David Friend Hall at the Berklee College of Music, where Welwood teaches composition. I obtained an exclusive CD copy of that premiere performance directly from the composer. I feature it today in its world premiere broadcast. Like myself, Welwood is a Delius aficionado, but does not model his own music on the impressionistic Delian style.

You get to compare Welwood's setting of Cynara with that of Delius himself. It's a late work of his, completed in 1929 with the assistance of Eric Fenby. Delius scored it for full orchestra and solo baritone. For all its beauty, Cynara remains rarely recorded. When Mark Elder and the Halle Orchestra essayed it in 2012 they did so in studio conditions. Again Roderick Williams was the soloist. Cynara and Sea Drift were piggy-backed on the Halle's CD release of Gustav Holst's The Hymn of Jesus (1920). I broadcast the Halle-Holst Hymn from that disc on Sunday, March 23, 2014.

During this two-month period of programming I drew largely upon recordings in my own collection of opera on silver disc. The only items derived from our WWUH classical music record library are the two comic operas of Bolcom and Musto, Steven Mercurio's Many Voices and the Rossini opera buffa. (Oh yes, I must not forget the Delius tracks from the Halle Orchestra CD, which is also in the station's holdings.) Thanks as always to our station's operations director Kevin O'Toole for mentoring me in the preparation of these notes for cyber-publication.