Frederick Delius

Delius was born in Bradford, England, into a family of wool merchants. In 1884 he was sent to run an orange plantation in Florida, where the songs of African-American workers left a mark on his early music; from 1886 he studied in Leipzig, where Edvard Grieg encouraged him. From 1897 he lived in France, at Grez-sur-Loing, and the conductor Thomas Beecham championed his music in England from 1907.

From Wagner he took music that flows without breaks and chromatic harmony, in which chords slide by small steps. Grieg's light textures and love of folk melody showed him how to thin out that heavy sound, and later critics also heard links with Debussy. Delius mostly avoided sonata form and other set designs: critics compared his pieces to painting rather than architecture, with the melody floating inside slowly shifting chords. In his mature orchestral writing the strings are often divided into many separate parts, while woodwind add brief comments and decorations.

On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring (1912) is the first of his Two Pieces for Small Orchestra, though it was written after its partner, Summer Night on the River (1911); the pair were presented as Stimmungsbilder, or mood pictures. Arthur Nikisch conducted the first performance with the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig on 23 October 1913. Like Brigg Fair and In a Summer Garden it is a short nature piece, more compact than his earlier tone poems. Its second theme is a Norwegian folk song, In Ola Valley, which Percy Grainger showed him and which Grieg had set in his 19 Norwegian Folk Songs, Op. 66. Delius wrote that spring always made him long for Norway.