Compositional maturity came for Delius at the turn of the century, and with it the ambition for large-scale utterance hand-in-hand with a pressing need to find formal designs capable of sustaining grandiose proportions. The operatic framework of A Village Romeo and Juliet—composed over 1900-1901, his first fully characteristic work—offered one solution. The quasi-dramatic Nietzsche settings of A Mass of Life offered another. Such orchestral works as the piano concerto or the tone poem Paris, are far less satisfactory due to the conflict of an unconventional imagination at war with conventional formal procedures. The adoption of a loose scheme of variations provides the scaffolding of his most successfully extensive works, beginning with the revised version of Appalachia (1898-1903), "variations on an old slave song," and, preeminently Brigg Fair. As Peter Warlock noted in his pioneering Frederick Delius, published in 1923, "The first Dance Rhapsody which dates from the same period as Brigg Fair is almost exactly similar in form. After a quiet prelude, the chief dance theme is announced by the oboe, and save for a middle section, which is yet pervaded by echoes of the main theme, the whole work consists of repetitions of this one melody with harmonic variations that are kaleidoscopic in their in their ever-changing tones and colours." Composed in 1908, for those colors Delius required a profligately large orchestra supplemented by unusual instruments. Thomas Beecham left a flamboyant account of the First Dance Rhapsody's premiere, conducted by the composer in the Hereford Shire Hall on September 8, 1909, as part of the Three Choirs Festival. Delius delegated a prominent part to the rarely encountered bass oboe, and for the occasion only a lady amateur could be found to play it. "Now the bass oboe...is to be endured only if manipulated with supreme cunning and control...a perfect breath control is the essential requisite for keeping it well in order, and this alone can obviate the eruption of sounds that would arouse attention even in a circus. As none of these safety-first precautions had been taken, the public...was confounded by the frequent audition of noises that resembled nothing so much as the painful endeavour of an anguished mother-duck to effect the speedy evacuation of an abnormally large-sized egg...." Pratfalls aside, Warlock put his finger on one source of Delian magic—"...though the outward form of the work is of the crudest and simplest character, its spiritual curve, so to speak, is wholly satisfactory."

© Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide