Frederick Delius

Frederick Delius was an English composer of late-Romantic orchestral and choral music whose impressionistic harmony drew on his years in Florida, Norway, and France rather than on the English pastoral tradition with which he is sometimes grouped. Born in Bradford, Yorkshire, in 1862 to German wool-merchant parents, he resisted his father's plans for a commercial career.

Sent in 1884 to manage a Florida orange plantation called Solano Grove on the St Johns River, he abandoned the business to study harmony with the Jacksonville organist Thomas Ward and absorbed the singing of African-American workers at neighbouring plantations, an influence audible in Appalachia (1903) and Florida Suite (1888). After enrolment at the Leipzig Conservatory in 1886 he met Edvard Grieg, who persuaded his father to fund a composer's life.

Settling at Grez-sur-Loing outside Paris in 1897 with the painter Jelka Rosen, whom he married in 1903, Delius produced his most enduring scores: the operas A Village Romeo and Juliet (1901) and Fennimore and Gerda (1910), the choral A Mass of Life (1905), Brigg Fair (1907), and the orchestral miniature On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring (1912).

Syphilis contracted in his Paris years left him blind and paralysed by 1928. From that year until his death in 1934 he dictated his final works to the young English musician Eric Fenby, including A Song of Summer.

The name Frederick is a masculine name of Germanic origin meaning "peaceful ruler," from frid ("peace") and ric ("ruler"). His parents originally registered him as Fritz, the German short form, and he used it socially until middle age, when he adopted the English form to align his public name with his adopted English identity.