Throughout his career, Delius was compelled by Wagnerian ambition to works on a large scale, while his peculiar gift lay in a concentrated utterance of musical stream-of-consciousness, moments of ineffable poetry in which form dissolves into a collage of sensuous orchestral oddments held together by sheer feeling. Such moments are strewn liberally throughout his works from beginning to end, though they become the work itself only after 1900. Delian magic attends, for instance, the opera Koanga (1895-97), Appalachia (1896), in which the variation form is more congenial to it than attempts to bend it to the demands of a Piano Concerto (1897) or the tendentious program of Life's Dance (1899). Paris—The Song of a Great City (1899) is almost pure evocation, though its effectiveness is diffused by its length. All are on a large scale, as is A Village Romeo and Juliet (1900 -1901), though the latter is a pivotal work in which Delius achieves a harbinger of his sui generis manner.

As in the works of the 1890s, A Village Romeo and Juliet, based on a work by Gottfried Keller, evinces large stretches of dutifully adequate, sometimes abjectly formulaic, music which, although not lacking charm or personality, do not seem not quite all-of-a-piece, or wholly realized, as are those scenes—or the orchestral meditations upon them—which gripped the composer and for the sake of which the opera exists. That they succeed despite the stilted diction of Delius' libretto—"...and then to die—would not that be a wondrous fate?"—is a telling confirmation of their power. The archetypal "black fiddler" of Keller's popular novella obviously held a deep fascination for Delius, as did the free-living, free-loving bohemians who attempt to entice the young lovers to join them. It must be said that the opera contains some of Delius' most mawkish music, too: the lovers' wedding dream, for example. Their eventual suicide by drowning, as they make love for the first and last time on a sinking barge, afforded Delius the opportunity to compose an urbane, poetic answer to the Liebestod—perhaps the archetypal moment in operatic experience. But for all their attractiveness, these morceaux—whether vignettes or, like the finale, rhapsodically extensive—are marked by a certain broadness of conception which looks back to the manner of the 1890s. Delius' love-death, for instance, belongs to the world of Appalachia. In the frequently excerpted orchestral interlude known as Walk to the Paradise Garden, on the other hand, he distills the poetry of the drama in a spellbinding, incandescent span which stands out as pure Delius, prophetic of such sounding miracles as Summer Night on the River, Brigg Fair, Songs of Sunset, or the late Irmelin Prelude. If A Village Romeo looms as something of a mixed bag, Delius' mixture of the exquisite and the visionary justifies its periodic revival.

Delius composed A Village Romeo to his own English text which, with the help of his wife, he translated (with occasional gaffes) into German for its first performance at Berlin's Komische Oper, February 21, 1907, led by Fritz Cassirer.

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Scene 5 - 5.Interlude: The Walk to the Paradise Garden

Composed over 1900-1901, A Village Romeo and Juliet is the first extended work of Delius' maturity—the first in which his musical language is confidently, complexly congruent with his personal vision. And if that vision deepened into an impersonal Nietzschian wisdom as the century moved on, A Village Romeo looms as the unique moment in Delius' work in which Romantic love is portrayed with passionate directness. On that score, the verismo-cum-Wagner working out of Koanga (musically motivated, in any case, by Delius' absorption in the indigenous Black music of the American south) before, and Margot la rouge after, hardly rates. In the later works, human affections are jaded or compromised (e.g., Cynara ["I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion"]) or the adulterous affair atmospherically sketched in the first part of Fennimore and Gerda (1909-1910), his last opera, in which the happy ending is gratuitous and unconvincing. And after the extended duet, which A Village Romeo largely is, the only other love duet in Delius' ripest style is that between Zarathustra and "Life" in the third movement of A Mass of Life (1904-1905)! In his adaptation of Swiss poet and novelist Gottfried Keller's novella Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe, Delius—with the dubious help of the numismatist and litterateur Charles F. Keary—shows the lovers Sali and Vrenchen first as children before presenting them at length as mutually absorbed teenage naïfs, thereby investing their attraction with an aura of fore-doomed innocence. As fine as their final rapturous duet and Liebestod are, however, Delius entrusts the supreme expression of their love to the orchestra in the often-excerpted interlude known as The Walk to the Paradise Garden linking the tumultuous fair scene with the couple's startled arrival at the Paradise Garden tavern, hangout of bohemians, vagabonds, riffraff, and the Dark Fiddler who haunts the children. Technically, it allows the music to flow seamlessly, prompting the mind's eye to a vision of the lovers alone with their love, as the scene is shifted behind the curtain. A motivically knit rhapsody, it melds the children's ecstatic passion with the serene impersonality of nature—in passages foreshadowing Summer Night on the River (1911) and On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring (1912)—with incandescent poignance. Curiously, this interlude, often cited as the heart and distillation of A Village Romeo, was composed and added to the score only in 1906 and is usually heard in Sir Thomas Beecham's arrangement for reduced orchestra.

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