Sketched in 1919, Avant que tu ne t'en ailles was among the last completions dictated in 1931 to Eric Fenby in the miraculous spate of works composed by the blind, paralyzed Delius. Verlaine's poem, in its rhyme-studded simplicity, is among his most musical, though, curiously, Delius responds to its sentiment rather than to the verse's movement, as Fauré did, consummately, in the Verlaine settings of Cinq Mélodies de Venise. Instead, Delius follows Verlaine's evocation of the fading morning star into his beloved's dream with a cool, almost diffident, and very simple spiriting up of a dawn aura. Fenby is revealing here: "It has always struck me as odd that with the innumerable evidences to be found in his music of a highly developed and extremely subtle feeling for sounds at work -- the slow movement of the double concerto and several 'pictures' in the opera Fennimore and Gerda are miracles of loveliness when played with understanding, if we have ears to hear -- Delius had no feeling whatever for the music of words...In setting words, however, it must not be imagined that he was careless. I have heard him declaim a phrase over and over again -- but always, oh, so clumsily! -- before finding the music for it. It will, no doubt, astonish the many who, like myself, must often have flinched before his mutilations of English to hear that he used to say, 'I am always at my best when there are words.' That he probed to the heart of whatever poem he was setting is beyond the shadow of a doubt, but I am equally certain that he had no notion of how badly he declaimed English." And that applies a fortiori to Verlaine's irresistible dance-like rhythms. Nevertheless, Verlaine was the most notorious of the poètes maudits -- already passing into legend at his death on January 8, 1896, at 51 -- and represented for Delius the fin de siècle era (which persisted until the Great War) in which he came to maturity and wrote his strongest works. Delius, himself, was one of the maudits, touched, like Chabrier, Wolf, and his friend, Gauguin, by syphilis, though he lived longer than they, and with an unclouded mind. It is indicative of his artistic lineage, celebrated at length in his tone poem Paris, that his first Verlaine settings date from 1895, with two more songs following over 1910 and 1911, and Avant que tu ne t'en ailles crowning the lot among his last creative utterances. ~ Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide
