Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Delius: Fennimore and Gerda

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Every summer, on the last Sunday in August, I broadcast one of the six operas of Frederick Delius (1862-1934) because Delius's exquisitely impressionistic style of music is so evocative of the lazy, hazy end of summertime--especially in its depiction of Nature in the fullness of the harvest season. I have aired Delius's last opera Fennimore and Gerda (1919) five times before in my complete broadcast cycle, year by year, of them all.

For the story of Fennimore and Gerda, Delius drew upon Danish literature. He conceived a series of musical depictions of two episodes in the life of the writer Niels Lyhne as related by the nineteenth century poet/novelist, Jens Peter Jacobsen. Fennimore and Gerda is a tale of unfaithfulness in love and the numbing loss of an artist's creative powers. The score is absolutely lovely, as Delius's music always is, but the staging of this opera is problematic, more like a film in its abruptly changing scenes. Delius's operas are perfectly suited for radio broadcast because radio facilitates the theater of the imagination without need of cinematic treatment. Delius fashioned his own German language libretto for the opera's premiere.

A young friend of the composer, Philip Heseltine, prepared the English language version, the one EMI taped in 1976, with Meredith Davies conducting the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. The distinguished Swedish soprano, Elizabeth Söderström, is featured as Fennimore, supported by a cast of top notch English singers of the mid-twentieth century. This classic recording, originally issued on Angel/EMI LPs, was released on a single compact disc in 1997.

Following Fennimore and Gerda, keep listening for a recording of Delius's choral masterpiece, Sea Drift (1904), his setting of the poetry of Walt Whitman, also perfect for broadcast during the late-summer vacation season, when people head for the Long Island or Cape Cod seashore.