The Florida Suite is the stuff of legend. After a desultory school career and a rather wavering application to the family wool business, young Delius persuaded his father to stake him as master of a hundred-acre orange plantation along the St. Johns River, south of Jacksonville, Florida. Taking a Cunard liner from Liverpool, he arrived in late March 1884 and remained until September 1885. The impact of those months can hardly be overestimated, for it was here, in this lushly tropical setting, with its glowing spectrum of lurid natural splendors and preternatural quiet, that he recognized his vocation and took his first real steps toward it. When Delius took possession of Solano Grove, he had just turned 22. The critic, Cecil Gray, who knew the composer well in his later years, ascribed to this period "... that which is known to mystics as 'the state of illumination,' a kind of ecstatic revelation which may only last for a split second of time, but which he who has known it spends the rest of his life trying to recapture...I knew, too, the exact moment at which that experience must have occurred...and when I asked him if it were so and if I were right, he was surprised and admitted that I was. The occasion was one summer night, when he was sitting out on the verandah of his house in his orange grove...and the sound came to him from the near distance of the voices of the negroes in the plantation, singing in chorus. It is the rapture of this moment that Delius is perpetually seeking to communicate in all his most characteristic work."

It is highly unlikely that Delius ever turned a dime (or a shilling) cultivating oranges, and his father eventually capitulated to force majeure by allowing him a period of study at the Leipzig Conservatory (beginning in the fall of 1886). While his actual studies at the conservatory proved relatively uninspiring, they did bring him into contact with Edvard Grieg, whose music and friendship would serve to cement his desire to become a composer. Grieg's lyrical suites also offered a convenient, if temporary, model that allowed the young Delius to give expression to the richness of his Florida experience. The resulting Florida Suite, was composed over 1886-1887.

The work is in four broadly expansive movements. The first, "Daybreak-Dance," opens with a lyrically rippling, ever more animated, evocation which gives way to a dance, "La Calinda"; this dance is one of the most ravishing moments in Delius' oeuvre, and he would make use of it again in his opera, Koanga. The second, "By the River," is a melodically effusive, fluently ingratiating elegy with two strains, laid out in a simple ABA design. In "Sunset-Near the Plantation," another spate of rhapsodic tone-painting again gives way to a spirited dance. The fourth movement, "At Night," opens with a horn quartet suggesting at once muted fanfares and plantation slaves singing a spiritual from across the water; this eventually yields to an alternately blithe and impassioned love song.

Delius must at some time have been assiduous in his studies, for he has the orchestra well in hand in this, his first large work. For the price of a barrel of beer, he heard the Florida Suite once in early 1888, in the company of Grieg and Christian Sinding, given by a restaurant orchestra in Leipzig; after this performance, he revised two movements and laid the work aside. It remained for Sir Thomas Beecham to discover and give it a proper premiere in 1937, three years after Delius' death.

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