Word: masses
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...ignored him. In 1899 Delius himself arranged a concert in London; in 1929 Sir Thomas Beecham had organized a six-day Delius Festival, which the composer attended in a wheel chair. But his opera, Koanga, had waited more than 35 years for its British premiere. His masterpieces, the Mass of Life and the opera, A Village Romeo and Juliet, had received only a half-dozen hearings, none at all outside Central Europe and London...
...heard. Even those U. S. concertgoers who knew something of his work thought of him primarily as an Impressionist composer of small-scale, poetic pieces for orchestra, a sort of minor Ravel. Last week, Manhattan music-lovers were jolted into rating Delius many notches higher. His 33-year-old Mass of Life, given a belated U. S. premiere by Conductor Hugh Ross and the Schola Cantorum, proved the outstanding event of the concert season so far, revealed its composer in a new and very different light. No impressionist miniature, the Mass of Life required the booming efforts of a gigantic...
Like his contemporaries, Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler (Symphony No. 1), Delius went to Friedrich Nietzsche's ode to the superman,Thus Spake Zarathustra, for inspiration, converted portions of its Biblical German oratory into choruses and vocal solos, illustrated its moods with a surging orchestral undercurrent. His Nietzschean Mass, which requires over an hour and a half to perform, is so perfectly formed and climaxed that the listener's interest never lags-a pretty sure sign, in a pieqe of that size, that a great musical mind has been at work...
...gaining access to the great composer was merely by stating that he was "an Englishman who writes verse." This was enough and he was soon entertained by the hospitality of Sibelius and his wife. Of the composer's appearance he says only a word: "His head was impressive; the mass of Strindberg's without the madness." The interview was typical of the author. He was not, like Boswell, "out with his notebook and pencil as soon as the car left the gate." In his own words, he says, "To me it all seems to have passed in a dream, ending...
After turning the last page of "The Honeysuckle and the Bee," the reader does not find himself equipped with a mass of data ready to be incorporated in a lecture on Sir John Squire. He finds, rather, an impression of the man, and with this an intimacy with contemporary English men of letters, and indeed men in every walk of his life, for the book does not alone with the writers. Perhaps the work is not of great lasting value, because it may not be great, but certainly it is of intense interest, and significant for its change from...