Delius: The Choral Music

Extract

Appalachia, Delius's first choral work—for orchestra and chorus rather than chorus and orchestra—began life (in 1896) as a set of orchestral variations on an old slave song. In 1902, however, Delius had vocal after-thoughts; he added choral parts to some of the variations and concluded the whole with a rousing choral finale. Excluding the finale, the vocal contributions take the following shape: (a) a choral (a cappella) variation—a heavily chromaticized harmonization of the slave song (“After night has gone comes the day”); (b) choral punctuations of certain variations, codas by distant la-la-ing, chordal sighs on ‘Ah!’, or wordless presentation of the ascending first phrase of the slave song. Appalachia, despite the vocal contributions, remains largely instrumental, and need not long detain us as an example of Delius's choral music. The finale, for all its ingenious manipulation of thematic material previously heard in instrumental guise, amounts to little more than a picturesque summing-up of Delius's evocation of the sights and sounds of the Mississippi. Of more significance for the future are the always very brief but deeply poetical vocal interventions in the orchestral texture. In Appalachia these disembodied voices have only a small rôle—tail-pieces within codas, so to speak—but Delius thereby disclosed his instrumental conception of voices which was fully to materialize itself in the subsequent Song of the High Hills, the two a cappella and wordless choruses To be sung of a summer night on the water, and the dance sections of A Mass of Life.