Nietzsche underlined his attack on Wagner's "incapacity for...organic form" by calling him "our greatest miniaturist in music who crowds into the smallest space an infinity of sense and sweetness. His wealth of colors, of half shadows, of the secrecies of dying light spoils one to such an extent that afterward all other musicians seem too robust." The remark could refer as well—or better—to the mature works of Delius, who, as man and artist, drew most deeply from, respectively, Nietzsche and Wagner. With World War I raging, Delius had been busy throughout the winter and spring of 1917 at his home in the French village of Grez-sur-Loing, completing the tone poem Eventyr, revising his String Quartet, and composing two brief, mixed a cappella part songs for To be sung of a summer night on the water. To his young friend Philip Heseltine—known to all lovers of English song as Peter Warlock—he wrote on the May 27 that "It is a great thing to be able to isolate ones [sic] self completely: altho' not very practical." The part songs received their first performance only on June 28, 1921, at a London concert by Kennedy Scott and his Oriana Madrigal Society. Vocalizing on wordless vocables, both songs evince an immediate lyrical lift, transporting the listener to other realms, in down-distilled, immensely filled, meltingly sensuous evocations. The first song takes one to a realm of fairy, of beauty heartbreakingly beyond human passion; the second (with its tenor solo set against diaphanously shifting harmonies) is magically redolent of a bliss surpassing all mortal cares. Words, here, would have been inadequate—and too limiting—for the sudden seductive nostalgia felt for a world never known or even dimly suspected.

In the fall of 1932, with the composer now blind and paralyzed, the part songs were arranged for string orchestra as Two Aquarelles by Eric Fenby, a young, intrepid Yorkshire musician to whom Delius dictated a surprising number of fine, late works. What is haunting in the choral version becomes caressing and consoling in the string arrangement. It is a mere musicological nicety that bars them from the list of the composer's original works—the Two Aquarelles are as nearly pure Delius as it was possible for another hand to come, and were done, moreover, under the composer's supervision. Here, then, is "an infinity of sense and sweetness crowded into the smallest space," for Fenby's own classic, lovingly lingering recording of the 2 Aquarelles with the strings of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra lasts just under five minutes.

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