It is May 1933 and we are in the garden of Delius’s French home at Grez-sur-Loing, twenty miles south of Paris. There is a table covered in a white cloth, and around the table chairs. To one side an easel with one of Jelka Delius’ unfinished canvases. It is a hot day.

We hear Noel Coward singing “ Lover of my Dreams”.

The 71 year old Frederick Delius enters pushed in a wheelchair by his German nurse, Carl; they are followed by Delius’s wife, Jelka. Delius is paralysed, and partially blind as a result of Syphilis. He wears a white suite, white shirt, dark glasses, and a large white fedora. Jelka is a woman in her 60s, and her clothes are more reminiscent of the 1910s, than of the 1930s. As the Noel Coward fades we hear Delius’s Concerto for Cello in the background. The nurse parks Delius to one side of the table, and Jelka sits at the other side.

JELKA: Why did you say he could call, Fred? You know I don’t like Elgar.

DELIUS: Jelka? Leibling? Edward is a good man, a good composer too. But not as good as me you understand.

JELKA: He intimidates me, he’s so loud, and tall.

DELIUS: Jelka Rosen, daughter of a Junker intimidated by an Englishman?

JELKA: Just don’t ask me to join in. I shall escape and paint for the day.

DELIUS: As you wish, but at least stay for an hour, and make him welcome. (To the nurse) You may leave us now, Carl, but keep a look out for Sir Edward.

The Nurse Exits

JELKA: An hour.

DELIUS: Good, then you can escape.

We hear the sound of men laughing.

DELIUS: I think he is already here, my dear?

Enter Sir Edward Elgar, followed by his driver Joe. They are still laughing as if they have shared a rather good joke. Elgar is wearing a dark suit, and has a cane. Joe is wearing a rumpled suit and shirt. Elgar sees Delius.

Sir Edward Elgar

ELGAR: Ah, Fred.

Elgar goes over to Delius, removes the fedora and kisses the top of Delius’ head, then puts the hat back.

ELGAR: How are you, old man?

DELIUS: As you see, Edward, as you see. Such noise.

ELGAR: Joe can tell a good joke. (To Jelka) How are you, my dear?

JELKA: Fine.

ELGAR (To Joe): Joe, say hello to Frederick Delius, England’s finest composer, and his delightful wife Jelka.

JOE: A great pleasure, sir, ma’am.

DELIUS: Fred, call me Fred.

JOE: Fred, sir.

ELGAR: We had quite a journey did we not, Joe?

JOE: We did.

ELGAR: Nearly ended in the ditch, some damn fool of a motorcyclist. Joe is a taxi driver from Paris, an American.

DELIUS: Ah, indeed. I spent many happy years in Paris, it is the most wonderful of cities, is it not?

JOE: Indeed it is, sir, er, Fred.

DELIUS: Sit down, Joe, Edward. But alas I fear we may all remember this day, and this year for more important reasons than a motorcyclist. I received a letter from my sister this morning where she has written again of the outpourings of adulation shown on Hitler’s birthday last month. It obviously preys on her mind a good deal, and I have to say I fear for my family’s land under his chancellorship.

ELGAR: You may be right, Fred, and I have to say I feel he is greatly flawed. A statesman who begins by persecuting the Jews is as hopelessly compromised as an officer who cheats at cards. But I feel I must support his proclamation on compulsory labour, and his nationalisation of the trade unions, which are essentially communist of course.

DELIUS: You sound like your friend Shaw.

ELGAR: George? The most notorious of communists. And he would argue that it is senseless for Hitler to denounce Marxism at every opportunity, that he should wait to see who his friends are.

JELKA: Sir Edward. Fred. I will not have politics discussed on such a beautiful day.

Elgar goes across to Jelka and kisses her hand; he’d kiss her mouth if he could.

ELGAR: Madam Delius, Jelka, forgive me, and, as you say, on such a beautiful day, and in such a beautiful garden. It is an honour, a delight, to meet you again.

JELKA: Thank you, Sir Edward. Fred? That corporal will not last, the German people will not tolerate him.

Elgar returns to his seat.

DELIUS: But, Jelka, they voted for him in overwhelming numbers. He has already purged the universities of professors who do not agree with National Socialism. The work of Freud and Einstein can no longer be taught. The man will destroy everything that is beautiful, including this garden if he gets half a chance. He is the personification of the worst of the German character, the worst of you and I, Jelka. He is the brutality of the German army in 1914.

Elgar coughs

ELGAR: Joe? I wonder would you mind bringing in the package from the car?

JOE: Hell no, Sir Edward.

Joe Exits

ELGAR: Hell no. I rather like the American don’t you? So honest. We would have been lost in 1918 without them I fear.

JELKA: Sir Edward, please.

Go to Part 2.

No, I didn’t say that. It was a German, Oscar Adolf Hermann Schmitz, way back in 1904. Not so long ago that it doesn’t still wound.

Schmitz — or Fritz, as Sun readers would cry — had this to say of the land that bore Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Purcell, Parry and Holst :

England, he said is “Das Land Ohne Musik” — the land without music.

Thankfully, the country now has a champion. A man of many parts, a journalist and former editor of one of our top weekly magazines; a Member of Parliament and Shadow Minister for Higher Education, no less.

Step forward Defender of the Faith (musical variety) … (drum roll) : Boris Johnson.

A little late, we might murmur into our gins and tonic. And is he the best man for the job? After all …

But don’t look a gift horse in the mouth … even if Boris’s foot is already in it.

Enough of prelude and overture. Read Boris in his own words Here.

A Film by Ken Russell

Watching Ken Russell’s film about Delius with the most beautiful woman in the world the other weekend I was again amazed at its effectiveness at conveying a period - the 1930s - and of the composer, who was an enigma unto himself, and a complete mystery to the rest of us.

And I say that as a man who has written and directed a play about Delius, and his meeting with Elgar in 1934, but who nevertheless felt he’d only scratched the surface of one of England’s greatest composers, a composer who often denied his Englishness anyway, living outside the country all of his adult life, yet nonetheless sometimes considered himself a Yorkshireman but never a German, and he was both, but of wholly German parentage; and perhaps within that lies the mystery which his beautiful music adds to because it is itself a mystery in that it doesn’t seem to belong anywhere geographical, but everywhere emotionally - and emotion in music is an important but often dangerous thing.

The film, made for the BBC in 1968, is a small masterpiece that really does make you think you are in the claustrophobic Delius household, and sometimes within the claustrophobic mind of the composer who, because of his paralysis and blindness is now unable to compose, a condition the young Yorkshireman, Eric Fenby ( a charming man I had the honour to meet in the early 1990s), reads about in the press, which results in his travelling to France to try and help Delius with some unfinished scores.

And at the heart of this remarkable film is the tortuous journey that Fenby and Delius have to make before they discover not only trust, but a practical way in which they can work together that allows Delius to express himself and Fenby to get it all down. These scenes are the most moving in the whole film as Delius calls out the notation and for which instrument or groups of instruments the notation is for. And as the two men work, initially in a frenzy of misunderstanding ( Delius was taught German notation in Leipzig which confuses Fenby), which slowly becomes an understanding of intent, we begin to hear the music and watch as Delius hears it to in his head. It is great emotional cinema that matches the emotion of the music superbly well.

The performance of Max Adrian as Delius is remarkable, as are those of Maureen Pryor as his wife Jelka, and Christopher Gable as Fenby.

It was also good to see again the old bath-chair the BBC allowed me to use for my own play about Delius, a creaking old thing from the 1910s that had been gathering dust in the BBC props warehouse in Birmingham.

The film is based on Eric Fenby’s book Delius As I Knew Him, which I think is still available from Faber & Faber, with the video of the film available from BBC Films. Get it, it’s worth every minute.

Steve Newman

I first heard of George Lloyd about twenty years ago when I came across his second piano concerto on the BBC. I was overwhelmed by it, by its simplicity and stretched melodic lines that slowly embrace you like a lover. And the music is both mysterious ( like a good thriller writer Lloyd doesn’t give too much away too soon) yet familiar - familiar in the sense that its root stock comes from Delius and Vaughan Williams, yet, with that combination of faith and hope, a third voice, the unique voice of Lloyd, comes through like great shafts of sunlight striking Bodmin Moor on a dull summer’s day with the wind turbines marching across a landscape that, in musical terms, is undoubtedly Lloyd’s.

A couple of years ago I was in Cornwall researching for some pieces I was writing on D.H.Lawrence and inevitably found myself at the Zennor Folk Museum which has a good display of the fraught times Lawrence and his wife Frieda spent on the outskirst of Zennor during the First World War. Toward the end of my visit to the museum I came across a first floor room full of rusty domestic nick nacks that made me realise what a major task it must have been to simply open a tin can when Lawrence was looking for the quiet life back in 1917 and simply wanted to be left alone to write and look at the sea as I was now doing through a small church-like window set in the north-west-facing end wall of the room, a window that had a small sign above telling the world as secretly as it could that the composer George Lloyd was born in that very room in 1913, which meant that, as a four year old, he would have seen the strange red bearded man in a green corduroy suit, and his flamboyant German wife in flowing red skirts walking through the village or on the cliff tops many times. They are in his music - their oddness and their vibrancy and their colour, the red and the green.

George Lloyd began to compose early and had some success in the 1930s with two operas and a couple of symphonies, but then World War II came along Lloyd joined the Royal Marines where his long association with band music started. When his ship, HMS Trinidad was torpedoed on artic convoy service he thereafter began to suffer badly from shell shock which effectively destroyed his post war musical career. He spent many years earning a living growing mushrooms and carnations when Benjamin Britten for instance ( who lived in the US during WWII and saw no military service) was making a big musical name for himself.

When Lloyd came back to composing he was considered by many to be old hat, but listen to his music now and there can be no doubt that his creativity and genuine emotion, and not least his skill as an orchestrator and composer of mood and place is second only to the aforemention Delius and Vaughan Williams. He leaves many another English composer out in the cold.

Of his work Lloyd wrote:

” In the early ’60’s I was browsing over the idea of writing a piano concerto when I heard John Ogden for the first time: from then on I knew the style of playing I needed and always had the sound of that great player in my head. It was fortunate for me that Sir Charles Groves decided to give the first performance during October 1964 with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and John Ogdon as soloist.

” I had intended writing a large scale concerto with three movements but early on the first movement took on so much life of its own that it became the single-movement concerto I called ‘Scapegoat’.”

George Lloyd died in 1998 and left a lasting legacy of 12 symphonies, 4 piano concertos, 2 violin concertos, 3 operas, a large cantata for chorus and orchestra, ‘The Vigil of Venus’, and numerous smaller works including several for brass band.

If you want to find out more about George Lloyd, and support his music go to The George Lloyd Society.

Or visit the museum in Zennor.

Steve Newman