Boosey & Hawkes

Delius opera revival in Europe

(February 2002)

Recent years have witnessed growing interest in Delius’s operas, particularly in Germany where he enjoyed many of his early successes and opera premieres in the period 1900-15. Opera was a central thread in the composer’s output, but the works themselves rarely fall into traditional models in terms of format, plot or vocal deployment. As a 1999 survey in Opera magazine pointed out, "he was as much a maverick as Berlioz, Smetana or Janácek, blithely, indeed heroically disregarding all rules of opera composition." This unconventional quality, together with the composer’s passionate music and acute sense of naturalistic environment, have been capturing the interest of conductors and directors afresh, particularly those who work in medium-sized theatres but with good orchestral resources.

The Magic Fountain (1893-95), a quest for the fount of eternal youth culminating in a post-Wagnerian love-death, received a belated stage premiere at the Kiel Opera in 1997, followed by its UK premiere in 1999 from Scottish Opera conducted by Richard Armstrong. The Kiel Opera returned to Delius in 2000 with the half-evening Fennimore and Gerda, a depiction of Nordic life and love based on the novel by one of Delius’s favourite authors, Jens Peter Jacobsen. In 1999 Lukas Kindermann staged in Trier the first modern performance of Koanga, charting a tragic love-triangle on an American slave plantation, and the following year presented the composer’s one-act foray into verismo, Margot la Rouge.

Modern productions are most eagerly awaited for Delius’s most successful, moving and powerful opera, A Village Romeo and Juliet, particularly with the centenary of its premiere approaching in 2007. The first of these new productions is the work’s Italian premiere, taking place at the Teatro Lirico in Cagliari in April, directed by Stephen Medcalf and conducted by Gérard Korsten. The opera transposes the star-crossed lovers of Shakespeare’s tragedy to a claustrophobic 19th century Swiss farming community, where two families are torn apart by a land dispute. The young couple realise their dream of wedded bliss is unattainable and they elope to spend the night at the Paradise Garden, before seeking a watery grave.

"Delius puts his finger with painful accuracy on the fundamental malaise of modern civilized man – his hopeless longing to regain the lost world of nature and innocence. And this is why his music… still continues to make its subtle and disquieting impact." Deryck Cooke

A Village Romeo and Juliet’s performance history was launched at the Komische Oper (an der Weidendammer Brücke) in Berlin, and notable stagings in the UK have included productions in 1910 and 1920 at Covent Garden conducted by Beecham, at Sadlers Wells in 1962 and more recently at Opera North in the 1980s. Somm Records has recently released Beecham’s outstanding BBC recording of the opera dating from 1948 (SOMM-BEECHAM 12-2), a performance to treasure alongside the 1970s EMI version, still awaiting reissue on CD.

> Further information on Performance: A Village Romeo and Juliet

Photo: the stage premiere of The Magic Fountain at Kiel Opera (1997). Credit: Kiel Opera/Joachim Tode

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