"I cannot remember the first time when I began to play the piano: it must have been very early in my life," Delius recalled. "I played by ear, I used to be brought down in a little velvet suit after dinner to play for the company. My mother would say: 'Now make up something', and then I would improvise. When I was six or seven, I began taking violin lessons from Mr. Bauerkeller, of the Hallé Orchestra, who came over from Manchester especially to teach me." As an 18-year-old newly conscripted into the family wool business, Delius was sent to Germany, where commercial considerations took distant second place to concert attendance and violin lessons with prominent pedagogue Hans Sitt. Thereafter, his violin accompanied him through the vicissitudes of self-discovery and more failed tours as a commercial traveler. After the debacle of his venture as an orange grower in Florida, in the fall of 1885 the 23-year-old vagabond turned up in Danville, VA, in answer to a newspaper advertisement for a music teacher, and by October had established himself as "Professor" Delius. "I am sure it was charm, not teaching ability," Eric Fenby remarked, "that paid for his passage back to Europe in 1886, earned from giving violin lessons to the daughters of wealthy tobacco planters...." The consensus of his biographers is that, though talented, he would never have been more than third-rate and could not have made the cut as an orchestral player. Nevertheless, Delius confided his earliest articulate dreams and ambitions to the piano and violin, and it would have been surprising had he not left works for this combination. The pattern sketched in his recollections would follow him into his mature compositions, as in the violin sonatas, where a cavalier disregard for textbook form was compensated by a tendency to "wing it" in seemingly improvised flights. Delius is more cunning than that and his pieces are seldom shapeless, though their compelling trajectory is never amenable to conventional analysis. His imagination was rich enough that he could rely upon it, as in the First Violin Sonata. Sketched in 1905, the sonata was completed only in 1914. The meander of its rhapsodically dreaming first movement, playing nearly 12 minutes, can seem ramshackle, though its lyric flow is never less than ingratiating, while the animated second movement concludes the work in radiant winsomeness. It was premiered by Arthur Catterall and Robert Jeffrey Forbes in Manchester on February 24, 1915.

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