Not so Fragile Frederic
SIMON, JOHN
On Music NOT SO FRAGILE FREDERIC By John Simon British Music has had a tendency to sound a bit provincial: re-creating subdued British landscapes, rehashing early English composers,...
...The speed is intensified by keeping the scenes short and few...
...agriculture and Gerda were an afterthought...
...A young musician, Eric Fenby, rekindled Delius' spirits and took down the composer's important last works...
...Delius' saltatory strategy gives Fennimore and Gerda an Impressionist quality, comparable to a sequence of cathedrals or haystacks by Monet...
...Perhaps it is to counterpoise the sad conclusion of A Village Romeo and Juliet, and to rid himself of a certain Wagnerism—or maybe as a statement about two kinds of women— that the opera ends with a joyous kiss...
...Furthermore, Judith Howarth is a delightfully youthful Gerda, and even in a tiny part we hear the magisterial bass of Aage Haugland...
...Refusing to have more wool pulled over his eyes, he took off for Florida and promptly failed as an orange grower, but managed to get some formal musical training and also to teach music in Danville, Virginia...
...As a young boy, he was hopelessly in love with an elder cousin...
...His favorite form was variations, and this opera is, in a way, a set of variations, albeit on a nonmusical theme: the fortunes of Niels Lyhne in love, happy or unhappy...
...Philip Borg-Wheeler rightly speaks of Fennimore's "economy and intimacy making it more of a conversation piece," anticipating, in my view, such works as Strauss' Intermezzo and Capriccio...
...if it isn't quite like Jacobsen's, neither is it wholly unlike it...
...Born in Yorkshire into a German émigré wool-merchant family, he was destined for that trade and sent by his father on business trips to Germany, France and Norway...
...Left alone, he enlists in the war against Prussia and is mortally wounded...
...from Erik to join the young couple living at romantic Mariagerfjord: Erik can no longer sculpt, there is no intellectual stimulation in this burg, and the marriage has turned sour...
...After two years, his father relented and let him return and study music in Leipzig...
...Speed is the most original aspect of the work...
...One day when Fennimore expects Niels to come skating across the fjord, a telegram arrives instead: Erik has died in a traffic accident...
...Schoenberg's early masterpiece Gurrelieder is based on poems by Jacobsen...
...Delius was very fond of vocalise and wordless choirs, so we get a superbly lyrical passage for nonverbal voice drifting across the water in Scene 2, the brief but fetching harvesters' chorus in Scene 10, and the bell-like la-la of Gerda's young sisters in Scene 11...
...Soon they have a little boy...
...Taylor, "a provincial Debussy"), and there is something to that...
...Later composers, such as Janácek and Prokofiev, were to follow suit...
...Peter Warlock, loses much), even if the German of the two leading men, Peter Coleman-Wright (Niels) and Martin Tucker (Erik) is not flawless...
...After three happy years, during which Gerda loyally adopts Niels' atheism, she falls deathly ill and, dying, reverts to her childhood piety...
...In just 80 minutes the composer conjures up a whole Nordic world...
...The longer speeches fare better and, compared to full-fledged arias, feel concise...
...Humphrey Searle and Robert Layton write tellingly in Twentieth Century Composers about A Village Romeo and Juliet: "The music has a curiously dreamlike quality which is not dramatic in the orthodox sense but is full of atmosphere...
...The music has been accused of being static, and it is true that a lot of it moves too slowly, but it has an individual beauty of a 'sunset' kind...
...shows greater austerity, even astringency" than usual...
...But the music always fills in what is missing...
...Playing as much hooky as possible, young Fritz learned to play the violin poorly and the piano rather better...
...Most important is the relegation of opulently expressive melody to the orchestral interludes rather than to the sung parts...
...But he lets her slip through his fingers, and she sinks into a bourgeois marriage...
...It epitomizes the lyricism that made Richard Strauss say of Delius, "I would never have dreamed that anyone but myself could write such good music...
...to let Fritz become a composer...
...An old doctor friend with whom he used to philosophize counsels a Christian death...
...As with Mrs...
...To Niels' grief, she chooses Erik, and promptly marries him...
...Ravaged, he returns to farm the paternal estate and befriends a neighboring family with four daughters...
...But Niels, regaining his pride, dies an atheist...
...The score has many highlights...
...There he met and befriended Grieg, who persuaded Delius Sr...
...Horrible guilt overcomes her, and though the likewise griefstricken Niels wants them to continue together, she banishes him forever...
...His next love is Tema Boye, a young liberal widow, with whom he conducts a platonic affair...
...Niels Lyhne (1880), Jacobsen's magnum opus, is the story of a landowner's son who becomes a poet of some fame, travels a lot and, though part of the radical literary movement in Copenhagen, remains a rather shy, unassertive esthete...
...It fulfills what Delius foresaw as the opera of the future: "short, strong emotional impressions given in a series of terse scenes...
...The name must derive from James Fenimore Cooper, much read in those days...
...And because the locales and seasons change from scene to scene, he gets the same musical variety into it as into his shimmering tone poems...
...Delius has been called a Nordic Debussy (or, less kindly, by A. J.P...
...Fennimore and Gerda is subtitled Two Episodes from the Life of Niels Lyhne in Eleven Scenes...
...Previous composers adapting longer fictions or dramas preferred ampler scenes with clearer continuity—think Mussorgsky, Gounod, Massenet, Puccini...
...Fennimore and Gerda (1908-13) is based on the novel Niels Lyhne by Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847-1885), a poet and in my opinion Denmark's greatest novelist...
...The boy sickens too...
...Further studies in Leipzig were followed by 10 bohemian years in Paris, where Fritz, with some money from his father and an uncle, roistered with the likes of Gauguin, Strindberg and Edvard Munch...
...The men sing well enough, yet it is hard to fathom why Delius made the ineffectual dreamer Niels the baritone, and the more masculinely energetic Erik the tenor...
...Delius may have been the first to take a novel and extract from it what he needed without worrying overmuch about continuity...
...Moreover, good as that version is in many ways (some of the singers are better than on the Chandos disc), it loses by being sung in the stodgy English text...
...On Music NOT SO FRAGILE FREDERIC By John Simon British Music has had a tendency to sound a bit provincial: re-creating subdued British landscapes, rehashing early English composers, remaining too beholden to decorum...
...everything else in the novel that does not pertain to them, including the important atheism, was omitted, despite Delhis' own irreligion...
...Frederic Delius (1862-1924) was the one who pointed it toward cosmopolitanism...
...Excerpted and fused by Eric Fenby, they have yielded a splendid concert piece that could be used as an overture in opera houses concerned about Fennimore's shortness...
...She and Niels declare their love and, with her father's consent, marry...
...The single 80-minute disk is generally well performed, although I find the Norwegian mezzo Randi Stene a bit pedestrian as Fennimore...
...Especially in the short utterances, the music often embroiders and generalizes around the text...
...It deserves greater recognition: Despite a successful premiere in Frankfurt in 1919, it has seldom been revived...
...Every Delius opera has a sublime orchestral showpiece...
...Both dramatically and musically, the scenes build to a climax even if, in his preferred manner, they usually end quietly...
...His dialogue, however, tends to be long, formalized, literary speeches that are beautiful yet somewhat chilling...
...Niels settles across the fjord, and takes long walks with Fennimore in the woods, where they merge with nature if not with each other...
...And the Chandos, of course, has a more up-to-date acoustic...
...The opera is wisely performed in German as Delius wrote it (the English translation by his friend Philip Heseltine, a.k.a...
...There he spent the rest of his life, blind and paralyzed in his last years from syphilis contracted in America...
...She now desperately seeks Niels' friendship, and the two become lovers...
...Jacobsen, a botanist, Darwin translator and atheist who excels at nature description, brings flora as much to life as people...
...Gone, too, is anything after the happy marriage with Gerda—even though, as has been observed, the prevailing tone demands a pessimistic outcome...
...There was much travel, especially to his beloved Norway, but Delius eventually married the German artist Jelka Rosen and they settled 40 miles from Paris at little Grez-sur-Loing, in the bucolic Ile-de-France...
...This is different from selecting just one segment of a long fiction and fashioning that into an opera, as Ambroise Thomas did in turning Wilhelm Meister into Mignon...
...It is beautiful mood music reminiscent of the Delian orchestral works, though Delius lacks the ear of a Britten or Walton for making words and music cohere perfectly...
...Two years later, Niels gets an S.O.S...
...Perhaps for a better balance of Niels' baritone with Fennimore's mezzo, which must be darker than Gerda's soprano...
...The vivid new CD of Fennimore and Gerda (Chandos 9589) has Richard Hickox conducting Danish choral and orchestral forces, with British and Scandinavian singers...
...Originally only nine, it ended with the tragic parting...
...Though the most successful of Delius' six operas is the fourth, A Village Romeo and Juliet (there is a good performance on Argo 430275), it is his last, Fennimore and Gerda, that is most forward-looking...
...On a holiday with relatives, Niels and his cousin and childhood friend, the sculptor Erik, fall in love with Fennimore, the daughter of the house...
...Niels, to his ineffable shame, begs God for the child's life—in vain...
...There is no way for an 80-minute work to drag...
...In this last opera, though, as we have seen, the slowness is minimized...
...To read Jacobsen in the original, Rilke learned Danish...
...This has become the mode of most contemporary opera, so that the music is far from "a romantic swan song regretting past days," as Constant Lambert has called it, but resolutely forward-looking...
...Niels finds Erik spending his nights away from home, carousing with rowdy cronies, and neglecting or bullying the wretched and embittered Fennimore...
...On an earlier recording of the opera (EMI 66314), under Meredith Davies in 1976, the admirable Elisabeth Söderström sang both women, which strikes me as wrong...
...For the most part, Delius cut Jacobsen's long speeches down to virtual stichomythia that sometimes comes across like balloons in a comic strip...
...Yet the Dane, a Hamletic procrastinator, wrote only two novels, a few stories and a batch of poems...
...occasionally enhancing, this can also be jarring...
...As the title indicates, the two antithetical women have become the focal points...
...Thus the prelude to Innelin, the dance "La Calinda" in Koanga, "The Walk to the Paradise Garden" in "A Village Romeo and Juliet, and the last two orchestral interludes here...
...Here, Borg-Wheeler goes on, "Delius' harmonic style...
...The eldest, Gerda, is just 17...
...Boye, the relationship seems to remain chaste—whether as a sop to contemporary mores, and meant to be seen through, is hard to tell...
Vol. 81 • March 1998 • No. 4
