EXPLORING MUSIC: ACCESSIBLE AND ENDEARING--Frederick Delius

"The thoughts of youth," said the poet, quoting, he insisted, an old Lapland song, "are long, long thoughts." Since he said this in a poem recalling his own younger days, I assume that what he meant was that the things and events of youth make the deepest imprint on our most vivid impres­sions. And here is Frederick Delius conjur­ing up in two compositions memories of his own earlier years, one fairly close to the source, one from a much later time.

It is the later music, the North Country Sketches, that involves the earlier recollections-the scenes and seasons of his native Yorkshire. He was born there in 1862, the fourth child of the 14 produced by an immigrant German business couple who had settled in Bradford to participate in the woolen trade. Although Bradford was one of those proletarian warrens that came out of the Industrial Revolution, it had a history that went back to Norman times, and boasted a handful of historical monuments, including a 15th-century cathedral.

But Delius probably entertained few hap­py memories of Bradford. Though his parents were people of some culture, they had no patience with Frederick's notion of breaking the bonds of commerce to starve as an "artsy." He hated his schooling, with predictable results, and found the wool trade so unpalatable that eventually he skipped to Monte Carlo and won enough money to subsist for some months as a beach bum.

What Delius wrote 30 years after he had shed the last Bradford tuft of wool for good was a four-movement tone poem, a sort of counterpart of Vivaldi's Seasons, except that the cycle replaces summer with a dateless "Dance" between winter and the onset of spring. The subtitles tell us that the wind soughs through the autumn trees and that the moors are silent in spring. Eric Fenby, the composer's sometime secretary, says that he has no idea what else Delius had in mind, save perhaps the dominance of Nature over Man, a Delian article of faith. (Fenby would know whether "Winter Landscape" connotes snow; me, I'm not sure, what with the Gulf Stream and all.)

The only record I ever returned to the store because I hated the music was "North Country Sketches" (Beecham version). I now find it more to my liking, but feel th:it it's too monochrome or, at best, pastel-ly to sustain my interest for nigh-on half an hour. But then I am not a rabid Delius fan.

The Florida Suite is basically much earlier, though Delius never heard it in the form played here. It was a product of his final attempt to please his father, whom he and a friend somehow persuaded to rent them a Florida orange grove to run. The friend soon bugged out, and Delius, Sr. bought the property for his son to manage. But music got the upper hand and Frederick was soon spending most of the time in Jacksonville studying with a local organist and drinking in the music of the local Blacks. In 1884 he turned the grove over to his brother Ernst (it was wiped out by a hurricane soon after) and moved to the city, where he lived on the bounty of a few students and his earnings as a member of a synagogue choir. (It was in Florida, incidentally, that he acquired the illness that left him blind and paralyzed for his final decade.)

The first version of the Suite, which draws from or imitates thematically American Black music, was a student effort originally, premiered in, of all places, a Leipzig beer hall ( 1888). Delius persuaded the musicians to play for free beer, and his teacher Hans Sitt conducted. Edvard Grieg was a member of the audience.

The work was revised later. It too is a cycle, depicting (somewhat more graphically than the other work) a day rather than a year. Somewhat salonesque in style, it is readily accessible, and indeed rather endearing. Delius knew it contain­ed good stuff and mined it for the operas The Magic Fountain and Koanga. By the way, 37 1/2 minutes of playing time is rather unusual for an LP side.