In an article for the London Daily Telegraph and Morning Post from March 21, 1953, Thomas Beecham recalled discussing with the blind and paralyzed Delius, just before his death, the revival of his first and second operas, Irmelin (1890-1892) and The Magic Fountain (1893-1895), works that had been on his mind. In 1931 Delius dictated to his amanuensis, Eric Fenby, the Irmelin Prelude, a brief orchestral piece worked from two of the opera's most meltingly captivating themes. "When you are satisfied that all or most of the works of my best period have been made well-known to the public through performance and publication," Delius told Beecham, "I should offer no objection to the appearance of any of these earlier pieces of mine which in your opinion would detract nothing from such prestige as my name may have acquired." But it was not until after the composer's death that Beecham resurrected, edited, performed, and recorded such early works as Sleigh Ride (1887-1888), Marche Caprice (1889-1890), and the Florida Suite (1887-1889). Beecham gave Irmelin's premiere, five performances, starting on May 4, 1953, at Oxford nearly two decades after Delius' death, to the bewilderment of critics and public disregard: "a complete and fatal flop," as he summed the venture up. Yet Beecham was not wrong in his faith in the music's expressive power: "An appealing freshness permeates the whole piece, the style and content of which are unmistakably those of the creator of Sea Drift and A Mass of Life." Given the naïve expectations of fairy tale opera, Delius made a respectable job of the libretto, for which he spun two Scandinavian tales into the saga of Irmelin, a princess who is also a genuine person, seeking her equal, not in rank, but as a person. After she's rejected 100 suitors, Nils, a prince disguised as a swineherd—the predestined lover—appears at the crucial moment to make the rare happy ending among Delius' six operas. In the Wagnerian aftermath, which produced such contemporary white elephants as d'Indy's Fervaal, Reyer's Sigurd and Salammbô, Strauss' Guntram, and the pseudo-operatic oratorios of Max Bruch, Irmelin follows Wagner's example in its use of thematic recall, with voices coasting into arioso (and an occasional aria) amid the spontaneous outpouring of rhapsodically durchkomponiert development, guided into shapeliness by the story. Unfortunately, by the time of its premiere, the vogue for operatic horror stories (e.g., Strauss' Elektra and Salome, Berg's Wozzeck and Lulu) eclipsed Delius' rarefied but moving triumph.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi