String Quartet (1916) (Parts)
Delius, Frederick
18,00 €
Delius, Frederick
String Quartet (1916) (Parts)
(b. Bradford,29 January 1862 — d. Grez sur Loing, 10 June 1934)
Writing from France in late autumn 1916, Frederick Delius observes, in an embittered tone, that English people “have very little imagination & therefore are very hard to appeal to
Though, at times in his life, Delius exhibited little love for England, his music, in its esotericism and distinctively modal sound, retains an intrinsic Englishness. Of course, Delius’s work owes much to the earlier music of Debussy (and he therefore admired Ravel also), but he still preserved traditional values such as creative control in matters of fidelity to his own scores (a 1925 letter finds him strongly emphasising that, while he lived, alterations to his music were to be made only with his permission). This indicates a composer who was, potentially at least, uncomprehending of any contemporary music that was built on tangibly looser or more abstract foundations. For Delius, what mattered was emotion. This may embody some degree of contradiction, for in his music we seem to have to understand a man who wrote voluminous personal letters of an essentially conversational nature that removes the edge from themes of philosophical profundity that he touches on (even where these are mentioned). To take this view of Delius relates well to what Deryck Cooke calls the “peculiarly limited” style and expressive range of his music, which is confined “to a very personal harmonic basis, and to a slow or slowish tempo, to express a particular aspect of human feeling” (rather than the depths of feeling; c. f. Deryck Cooke, Vindications. Essays on Romantic Music, London, 1982, p. 120). Cooke has little hesitation in making the value judgement that the best of Delius’s output lies in the music composed between 1899 and 1917, and if this categorization is to be accepted, we must account for the String Quartet in terms of its being typical of Delius’s core musical characteristics, in addition to its individuality.
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Score No. | 1095b |
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Edition | Repertoire Explorer |
Genre | Chamber Music |
Size | 225 x 320 mm |
Specifics | Set of Parts |
Printing | Reprint |