The three works of Delius' Small Tone Poems from the early 1890s exist only in the form that Sir Thomas Beecham later imposed on them. Like most of Delius' early music, the Tone Poems were tiny little slices of sonic scene painting serving as a backdrop for little tiny slips of folk tunes. "Summer Evening" is softly voluptuous with chromatic harmonies. "Spring Morning" is sumptuously supple with sighing melodies. "Winter Night," also called "Schlittenfahrt" (Snow Ride), has a jaunty tune riding on a gently galloping rhythm complete with sleigh bells. Delius later used portions of "Summer Evening" as the basis of his Summer Night on a River, portions of "Spring Morning" as On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, and published "Schlittenfahrt" separately in Germany. After Delius' death, Beecham took the original works and edited, elaborated, and re-scored them for their premiere in 1949.

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1.Summer Evening

Summer Night on the River, composed in 1911, is the second of the Two Pieces for Small Orchestra, the first of which is the celebrated "On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring." The river in question is the Loing, upon which the wildly blossoming garden of Delius' villa, in the French village of Grez, near Fontainebleau, faced; this distilled tone poem—playing between six and seven minutes—is the upshot of many meditative hours spent there.

Delius' friend, the Italian composer, pianist, and philosopher of music, Ferruccio Busoni, described his own goal in composition as "dissolving the form into the feeling." Similarly, in performance he sought to achieve a state of Auflösung—or "dematerialization"—in which music should transcend mere notes and register as a direct spiritual prehension. To the predominantly intellectual Busoni, these qualities were ever elusive and consistently achieved only at the end of his life. For Delius it all came quite naturally, and perhaps nowhere else is more concentrated form than in Summer Night on the River. How atmospheric Delius' mature art became may be gauged by comparison with, say, the orchestral piece Summer Evening, of two decades before, which essays similar emotions. The latter is far closer to textbook procedure in having a recognizable, even effusive, melody worked by rule of thumb to an effect of great charm and conviction. Close examination of Summer Night on the River, on the other hand, reveals the musical materials to be of the most rudimentary sort—mere fragments of melody, scalar sliding, a muted two-note call, an impassioned viola arabesque, and so on. Delius' model is probably the Prelude to Wagner's Tristan, or any of a number of brief, mosaic-like passages in Parsifal, but instead of the erotically overheated, sickly ambience of those works, Delius evokes a blithesome rapport verging on the mystical, an audible "dematerialization" in which Summer Night's alleged formlessness wings into—coheres in—a feeling of compelling magic.

Summer Night on the River was given its premiere, with its companion piece, in Leipzig, October 23, 1913, under the baton of the legendary Artur Nikisch. After rehearsal, Delius wrote to his wife that "First Cuckoo" had been "rather too slow," but Summer Night on the River "He played most beautifully—perfect...."

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi

2.Winter Night (Sleigh Ride)

Though familiar in the orchestral version Delius made in 1889, Norwegian Sleigh Ride—also known as Schlittenfahrt, that is, Sleigh Ride, and Winter Night—was composed as a piano piece for a Christmas Eve celebration with the Griegs and is so listed in Robert Threlfall's authoritative catalog of Delius' works. In 1890 Delius included the orchestral version, with Summer Evening and Spring Morning, in the Three Small Tone Poems, RT vi/7. Apart from the piano piece, which Delius himself performed just once, none of these works was heard in their composer's lifetime and were resurrected by Thomas Beecham for the 1946 Delius Festival in London. On that occasion, Sleigh Ride was entrusted to Beecham's assistant, conductor Richard Austin. Sleigh bells and the canter of hooves are heard at the outset, set off by a chirpily cheerful tune on flutes, to return midway, though they soon give way to melodically generous evocations of moonlit, snow-covered vistas, dreamily yet ecstatically developed with a rare sense of inevitability, before ending with Delius' other perennial mood, a brief note of elegiac retreat. Sleigh Ride's sureness and charm, as well as that of several other pieces composed at the same time (e.g., the Marche Caprice, La Quadroöne, or, preeminently, La Calinda, from the opening movement of the Florida Suite) are ample demonstration that Delius could have made a lucrative career with such genre pieces. That he held them back is an earnest of his integrity and of the vision that guided him to, as Nietzsche has it, "Become who you are." At the end of Delius' life, Beecham discussed with him the revival of his early works: "...the answer he gave me ran something like this: 'When you are satisfied that all or most of the works of my best period have been made well-known to the public through performances and publication, I should offer no objection to the appearance of any of those earlier pieces of mine which in your opinion would detract nothing from such prestige as my name may have acquired.'" Throughout his career, Delius was able to conjure surefire magical moments, exquisite miniatures, whose brevity and simplicity belie their expressive punch, though it's revealing to compare Sleigh Ride and its companions with such blithesome mature numbers as Summer Night on the River (1911) or the Air and Dance (1915). The former's sentimental charms are those of a well-executed postcard, the latter's are distanced, yet keen, in their diffident sensuousness.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi