The coming of age narrative is a hardy perennial. For Delius it crystallized around Ibsen's 1859 poem "Paa Vidderne" (On the Heights), the figurative tale of a young man's year in the Norwegian mountains and gradual disaffection from the bonds of normal societal expectations—family, the beloved, the workaday world—in favor of a pointedly higher calling. That Delius devoted two major works to this poem testifies to its immediate biographical appeal. Composed over 1890-1892, the symphonic poem was preceded by an elaborate melodrama in which nine sections of the poem were to be recited against the illustrative rendering of a full orchestra. A staple of theater music in which the small pit band was discreetly muted for the spoken lines, in Delius' melodrama his fulsome music—in effect, small tone poems in themselves—overpowered the narration and the work remained unperformed. Considering the quantity of effective music in it, it's surprising how little of it he adapted for the symphonic poem. The notable carryover is a leaping triplet theme signaling aspiration, striving, a high wild urge for freedom, in heroic contrast to the symphonic poems of Franck and Liszt rendering Victor Hugo's poem "Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne"; there, "what one hears on the mountain" is the compelling yet strangely inarticulate voice of God. For Delius, the lesson of the mountain is to pass the trial through which one can say, "Now I am steel!" Afterward, God is abandoned—Delius would very soon encounter Nietzsche's works, which would guide the remainder of his life. Paa Vidderne, like the more polished fantasy overture Over the Hills and Far Away of 1895-1897, exhibits a number of Delian themes and moods strutted in conventional turns owing to Liszt and Richard Strauss (notably, Don Juan)—heroic gestures and occasional bombast—which would fall away as the composer entered his maturity, the heroics transmuted into the glowing ecstaticism of the hymn to the will opening the Mass of Life (1904-1905) and the bombast muted to mystic prehensions on the summit in A Song of the High Hills (1911), "the far, wide distance—the great solitude...." But as an assertion of independence and will to expressive power, Paa Vidderne is effectively thrilling and laced with appeal for rebels of all ages. Apart from an informal run-through of the Florida Suite, Paa Vidderne was Delius' first work to gain public performance, in Christiana on October 10, 1891, led by his mountain climbing companion Iver Holter.

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