 |
| Faber and Faber Ltd revised UK edition, 1981 |
My friendship with Delius has confirmed in me that things of the spirit are of the first concern: that artistry plus technique –– not too much technique, however, but a little in hand –– are as essential in life as in the arts; that one should do in the arts rather than learn; that faults should be pointed out and corrected after the experience of doing, not explained beforehand; that the people who really count are those who discover new ways of making our lives more beautiful. Frederick Delius was such a man.
The Memoir: Musical genius is a rare quality in human beings, something the majority of us can only fantasize about possessing even if we're fortunate enough to be blessed with a well-tuned ear and a modicum of talent. Even rarer is the opportunity to gain regular unrestricted access to such genius and, rarer still, to dwell side by side with it, both observing and interacting with it on a daily basis. But this was precisely what a twenty-two year old self-taught musician named Eric Fenby was able to do after writing to Frederick Delius in May 1928 and offering the blind and paralysed composer his services as his live-in musical assistant or amanuensis.
Fenby's first contact with Delius was an earlier letter in which he had expressed his enthusiasm for the composer's majestic 1905 choral/orchestral work A Mass of Life. Never expecting to be answered, Fenby was shocked to receive a reply from Delius (dictated to his wife Jelka) a few weeks later, thanking him for his interest. Believing this must be no more than a polite gesture prompted by the fact that he and Delius were fellow Yorkshiremen –– the composer was born in Bradford in 1862 following his family's emigration from Germany, while Fenby himself had been raised in the seaside town of Scarborough after being born there in 1906 –– the young man found himself becoming obsessed with the notion of helping Delius finish the compositions he was unable to finish due to his chronically poor health. 'It chased me like some Hound of Heaven,' Fenby later confessed, 'and I hid from it under any and every excuse I could find; but it was always there, and in the end I could not sleep for it. Finally it conquered me, and, getting up in the middle of the night, I took pen and paper and wrote to Delius offering my help for three or four years.' In October, his offer gratefully accepted, the Scarborough lad was on his way to the small French village of Grez-sur-Loing which, excluding trips home to visit his parents and work as assistant to Delius's greatest champion the conductor Thomas Beecham, would more or less remain his home until 1933.
It was not, of course, all smooth sailing following Fenby's arrival in France. Neither he nor Delius had any conception of how they were going to work together and no way of predicting if their unusual partnership would yield acceptable results. In fact, Fenby's first attempt to take down Delius's musical dictation was little short of disastrous, with the composer later admitting to Jelka that '…[the] boy is no good… he cannot even take down a simple melody.' That Fenby was able to persevere and help his employer compose or complete at least ten major musical works –– including A Song of Summer, the Irmelin prelude and several chamber and vocal pieces –– is a testament both to his great love of Delius's music and his own iron-willed determination.
Delius, whose physical condition had been steadily deteriorating since he'd first been diagnosed with syphilis around 1901, was a demanding, cantankerous, highly opinionated man who ridiculed Fenby's staunch Catholicism and made several unsuccessful attempts to permanently rid his assistant of his religious convictions. Without the praise and encouragement Fenby received from the composer's uncomplaining wife, and Delius's own gestures of generosity such as presenting him with his own gold watch as a token of his appreciation, it's doubtful he would have lasted in Grez-sur-Loing for as long as he did or been capable of assisting Delius to achieve what he did in what is now regarded as being his last 'great' period of composition. While living in the Delius household allowed Fenby to meet and form friendships with some of the most prominent figures in English music –– a list which included the aforementioned conductor Thomas Beecham plus the composers Philip Heseltine, Balfour Gardiner, Edward Elgar and Percy Grainger –– it also took an immense physical and emotional toll on him, resulting in at least one nervous breakdown (which, in his characteristically self-effacing way, he never discusses in his memoir).
 |
| JELKA and FREDERICK DELIUS, c 1932 |
It's not difficult to understand what might have triggered Fenby's emotional collapse. Delius was an incredibly sick man by this stage of his life, one who had to be carried everywhere by his live-in nurses, most of whom were German and, for the most part, ignorant and unreliable. Frequently wracked with pain which made it impossible for him to work or speak, the composer required every member of his household to take turns reading aloud to him, sometimes for as long as fifteen hours at a stretch as a means of distracting his sharp and still very active mind from his intense physical suffering. Fenby became, in the end, much more than simply an employee, one who had willingly sacrificed a large part of his youth to help a man he admired, respected and, over time, came to love despite his cynicism and ruthless dismissal of any music –– a list which included the works of Bach, Beethoven and Jean Sibelius –– which failed to meet his personal standards of artistic perfection. 'I have never heard of any artist,' Fenby observes, 'who was so completely and utterly himself, so detached and aloof from the world of his art and so little interested in the work of any other artist, past or present… "It is a great mistake for young composers to study too much," he used to say. "People with a little talent nearly always kill it with too much learning. Learning kills instinct. It is just as dangerous as too much reflection." '
The one flaw in Fenby's generally fine book is his own, sometimes awkwardly handled absence from its narrative. His very English reluctance to speak more directly and in greater depth about his own emotional state was probably something he saw as a self-protecting virtue, whereas the reader often wonders how he must have felt when such-and-such an incident occurred or Delius did or said this, that or the other to him. While he can be extremely candid about his employer's failings and equally quick to praise his virtues, he's careful not to delve too deeply into anything that might hint at controversy or cause discomfort to himself, his friends or his readers. The word 'syphilis,' for example, is mentioned only once and only in the notes he prepared for the revised 1981 edition of the book. (The original edition appeared in 1936, two years after the death of Delius.) Still, these are minor quibbles because Delius As I Knew Him remains a valuable record of a life lived uncompromisingly, written with skill and compassion by a man whose selfless generosity was entirely commendable. The book is equally valuable for the kind and sympathetic portrait it paints of Jelka Delius, in many ways the unsung hero of her husband's life whose support and understanding, both spiritual and financial, was what enabled him to become the artist he became and sustained him during his long slide toward a painful, humiliating and, in the end, much welcomed death.
 |
| ERIC FENBY and FREDERICK DELIUS, c 1930 |
The Writer: Eric William Fenby was born in the North Yorkshire town of Scarborough on 22 April 1906, where he developed an early interest in music courtesy of his musical parents and siblings. (His sister Ann eventually became a concert singer who later featured in several musical comedies.) Largely self-taught as a musician –– he was blessed with perfect pitch and the rare ability to interpret scores at first sight –– he was articled at the age of twelve to Claude Keeton, principal organist of St Martin's Church and at that time the most prominent musical personality in Scarborough. Fenby's work as Keeton's assistant, which included preparing performances for amateur choirs and choral societies in addition to playing the organ under the elder man's supervision during church services, served as excellent if unexpected training for his future role as Delius's amanuensis. Fenby's own compositions, many of which he subsequently withdrew and destroyed after becoming dissatisfied with them, were choral works influenced in equal measure by Keeton and his future employer's sprawling 1905 choral work A Mass of Life.
Fenby was employed by Delius for six years between 1928 and 1934, after which he returned to England where he became assistant to the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. In 1936 he returned to Yorkshire where he spent three months writing Delius As I Knew Him –– a cathartic task he pursued in total isolation so that his reminiscences could be recorded, he said, as accurately as possible. Following the book's publication later that year –– an event hailed by many as being the catalyst for a long overdue reappraisal of its subject's music –– he accepted an advisory role at the music publishing firm Boosey and Hawkes where he recommended works by the then little known Benjamin Britten and other young British composers including John Ireland and Arthur Benjamin. His friendship with hotelier Tom Laughton, brother of Scarborough-born actor Charles Laughton, led to an invitation from the latter to travel to Hollywood to compose the score for Jamaica Inn, a new Alfred Hitchcock film that Laughton was scheduled to appear in. Fenby's score was singled out for special praise by the critics and it's likely he would have go on to compose the score for Laughton's next film, the iconic The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), had World War Two not intervened and called him back to England where he was immediately conscripted into the Royal Artillery. His stint as an artilleryman did not last long, however, once his superiors learned that such a gifted musician was spending his days '…painting white lines on roads.' In 1940 he was transferred to the Army Education Corps and spent the remainder of the war lecturing to the troops on musical subjects, composing military music and scores for army stage productions and training films, and conducting the Southern Command Symphony Orchestra.
Having by now abandoned his adopted Catholic faith, Fenby married vicar's daughter Rowena CT Marshall in 1944 and eventually became the father of a son named Roger and a daughter named Ruth. His return to civilian life in 1945 also saw him return to Yorkshire where, three years later, he founded and served as director of the Music Department of the North Riding Training College, a post he would retain until 1962. That year he was also appointed artistic director of the Delius Centenary Festival being organised in the composer's home city of Bradford, re-establishing a connection between them which had ended, as he saw it, with the publication of his memoir.
 |
| Norbeck Peters Ford first US edition, 1936 |
The success of the festival led to him being appointed president of the Delius Society and, in 1964, Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music where he remained until his retirement in 1977. He also co-wrote the script for A Song of Summer, a 1968 BBC docudrama in which he was played by actor and former dancer Christopher Gable. He worked closely with Gable on his role and also served as adviser to Max Adrian, the actor who played Delius, later calling the finished film '…absolutely true to character' and '…disturbingly lifelike.' So lifelike was the film, in fact, that working on it revived many long suppressed memories and emotions and led to Fenby suffering a second nervous breakdown.
Although he relinquished his post at the Royal Academy of Music, Fenby did not relinquish his roles as the foremost expert on Delius's music. In addition to overseeing recordings of it –– including a highly praised series known simply as The Fenby Legacy –– and writing a second more scholarly book about his former employer, he also lectured on the subject of Delius in the UK and North America and was frequently interviewed about him on radio and television. Despite suffering poor health as a young man he lived to be ninety years old, dying peacefully in Scarborough with his family around him on 18 February 1997. It was left to his son Roger to define his legacy and his relationship with the composer whose music remains, for many, the quintessence of Englishness (despite the fact that Delius's ancestry was German). 'I think he dedicated his life to the music of Delius because nothing that ever happened to him after those years quite compared. Everything flowed from that time.'
A compilation of Eric Fenby's writings about Delius, which included the manuscripts of many lectures and broadcasts, was collated by his friend Stephen Lloyd and published as Fenby on Delius in 1996.
Use the link below to visit Eric Fenby: Unsung Hero of Music, an invaluable website containing a full list of his compositions (both solo and with Delius), a complete discography and photographs of his various homes in Scarborough as well as links to many samples of his music.
Use this link to visit the website of the Delius Society, a 'flourishing organisation whose aim is to bring together those interested in Frederick Delius and his music.' It also sponsors the Delius Prize, an annual competition aimed at interesting young musicians in exploring the composer's work which awards £1000 to its winner and £500 to its runner-up.
You might also enjoy:
Peel Me A Lotus (1959) by CHARMIAN CLIFT
Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945) by CARLO LEVI
Some Books About… FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN
Last updated 16 October 2021 §
