Frederick Theodore Albert Delius CH, originally Fritz Delius, was an English composer. Born in Bradford in the north of England to a prosperous mercantile family. He was sent to Florida in the United States in 1884 to manage an orange plantation. He soon neglected his managerial duties and in 1886 returned to Europe. After a brief period of formal musical study in Germany beginning in 1886, he embarked on a full-time career as a composer in Paris.
About Frederick Delius in brief
Frederick Theodore Albert Delius CH, originally Fritz Delius, was an English composer. Born in Bradford in the north of England to a prosperous mercantile family, he resisted attempts to recruit him to commerce. He was sent to Florida in the United States in 1884 to manage an orange plantation. He soon neglected his managerial duties and in 1886 returned to Europe. After a brief period of formal musical study in Germany beginning in 1886, he embarked on a full-time career as a composer in Paris and then in nearby Grez-sur-Loing. After 1918, Delius began to suffer the effects of syphilis, contracted during his earlier years in Paris. He became paralysed and blind, but completed some late compositions between 1928 and 1932 with the aid of an amanuensis, Eric Fenby. As his skills matured, he developed a style uniquely his own, characterised by his individual orchestration and his uses of chromatic harmony. Delius’s music has been only intermittently popular, and often subject to critical attacks. The Delius Society, formed in 1962 by his more dedicated followers, continues to promote knowledge of the composer’s life and works, and sponsors the annual Delius Prize competition for young musicians. The young Fritz was drawn to the music of Chopin and Grieg rather than the Austro-German music of Mozart and Beethoven. His parents were born in Bielefeld, Westphalia, and Julius’s family had already lived for several generations in German lands near the Rhine but was originally Dutch.
Julius’s father, Ernst Friedrich Delius,. had served under Blücher in the Napoleonic Wars. Julius moved to England to further his career as a wool merchant, and became a naturalised British subject in 1850. He married Elise in 1856, and the couple had four children, including Fritz, who was born in 1874. The family moved to Gloucestershire, where he did moderately well as the firm’s representative in Stroud. After being sent to Chemnitz, he neglected his commercial duties in favour of trips to the major musical centres of Germany, and musical studies with Hans Sitten and Henrik Iiberg. His father sent him to Sweden, where again he put his artistic interests ahead of commerce, coming under the influence of the dramatists Gunatrik Ibsen and Gunnar Iberg. He then went on to become a well-known violinist and teacher. He died in Paris in 1936, and was buried in a suburb of Paris, near his wife Jelka, where they had lived for the rest of their lives, except during the First World War. He is survived by his wife and two children, who he had married in 1878 and 1878. He also had a son, Fritz, and a daughter, Elisabeth, with whom he had two children. He had a grandson, Fritz Jr, who died in 1998.
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