Frederick Delius - Paa Vidderne (On the Mountains): Melodrama

[Justin]

I have mentioned this in a prior conversation, but I felt that this deserves its own dedicated thread since it highlights a nearly unknown side of Frederick Delius, 40 years before his professional relationship with Eric Fenby.

Delius wrote this melodrama in 1888 after Henrik Ibsen's 1860 poem of the same title: Paa Vidderne. The piece is written to closely mirror the verses of the poem, so that musical effects properly communicate the emotions of the passages.

It is important to preface that this composition is different from Delius' 1892 symphonic poem of the same title. No common musical themes or melodies are heard, although one could say that the sentiment is similar.

The work was never performed during Delius' lifetime, and it seems that the first performance was on the Norwegian broadcasting company NRK in 1981, against pictures of Norwegian landscapes. Several BBC performances followed, including one with Vernon Handley and the BBC SO, circa 1995. I have not been able to find a tape of that broadcast.

Delius had originally intended to write a singing part for tenor, but decided to change it to spoken word (against the suggestion of his close friend, Edvard Grieg, who was concerned the orator would be drowned out by the orchestra). This was not an unusual way to set music as melodramas were incredibly popular in the latter decades of the 19th century, with romantic Shakespearian works commonly adapted to music. Such context lends a theatrical milieu to Delius' work.

In 2000, Douglas Bostock and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra produced the world premiere recording, released on Classico. Peter Hall narrates the work, and the English text is taken from the original Norwegian by Ibsen with no effort to rhyme; it is a free-style English translation, which better conveys Ibsen's realism in my opinion.

Initially, the music was written against an inaccurate German translation by Louis Passarge, and because of the loss of detail in translation, there are musical effects that do not match the text from Norwegian and are dependent on the German. Therefore, with the music's emotional power as the top priority, Bostock and Hall worked closely with Lionel Carley (author of the English translation heard here), who tried to stay faithful to the Norwegian text and insert the German ideas where necessary to match the music.

Out of the five known performances of this work (this is the most recent), I assume that this Classico recording is the closest to matching Delius' vision and faithfully capturing Ibsen's poem.

Below is the link to the recording:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzbAQ0tgvWM

The 1981 Norwegian TV broadcast can be seen here:
https://tv.nrk.no/program/FMUS00001981

This is by far my favorite work by Delius.