An Arabesk, for baritone, chorus & orchestra, RT ii/7

• Date: 1911
• Composer: Frederick Delius
• Period: Romantic (1820-1869)

Review

"Fred set out to enjoy life, did so, & did not regret paying the price it cost," Percy Grainger -- another composer with curious sexual proclivities -- noted of Delius after his death. If not regret, its close kin, nostalgia, is a major aspect of Delius' art. Through the 1890s, Delius lived a vie de bohème in Paris' Latin Quarter, with Mucha, Strindberg, and Gauguin for boon companions. In 1895, Delius and Gauguin were diagnosed with syphilis. He remained relatively unscathed by his infection until 1910, when the emergence of the tertiary stage necessitated a prolonged stay at a sanatorium. In the decade between the turn of the century and the sudden grip of his disease, Delius hit his stride as a composer in a series of large-scale works -- A Village Romeo and Juliet, Brigg Fair, Sea Drift, A Mass of Life -- which, championed by Hans Haym in Germany and Beecham in England, established his reputation. Among the works of those years, Songs of Sunset (1907) and its pendent, Cynara (begun 1907), settings of poems by Ernest Dowson for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, take an autobiographical, and deeply nostalgic, turn -- "They are not long, the days of wine and roses; Out of a misty dream Our path emerges for a while, then closes, Within a dream." With the composition of An Arabesk in autumn 1911, this post-Romantic glow had darkened to an acknowledgement of the destructive underside of sexual pleasure, though in the veiled form of Jens Peter Jacobsen's symbolist poem through which Pan looms as the avatar of instinct leading to an enchantment irresistible but poisoned. After Nietzsche, Jacobsen was Delius' favorite writer. His final opera, Fennimore and Gerda, completed just before An Arabesk, is based on Jacobsen's novel Niels Lyhne. An Arabesk comes from the same volume of poems that furnished lyrics for Schoenberg's Gurrelieder, also completed in 1911. Though Delius set Jacobsen's poem in Danish, his wife Jelka translated it into German for the convenience of the German publisher, whence it was translated into English by Peter Warlock. Delius' surging evocations of sensual glamour are paradoxically suffused with an eerie sense of harboring traitorous sting. The premiere was given at the Welsh Musical Festival in Newport, Wales, on May 28, 1920, conducted by Arthur E. Sims. ~ Adrian Corleonis, Rovi

Albums with Complete Performances of the Work

Title	Date
Delius: A Mass of Life; Songs of Sunset; An Arabesque	1992
Delius: Songs of Sunset; Dance Rhapsody No. 2	1987
The Beecham Collection: Frederick Delius
The Delius Collection, Vol.6

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