Sarah Collins, 'The Composer as "Good European": Musical Modernism, Amor fati and the...

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The Composer as ‘Good European’: Musical Modernism,Amor fati and the Cosmopolitanism of Frederick Delius

SARAH COLLINS

Twentieth-Century Music / Volume 12 / Issue 01 / March 2015, pp 97 - 123DOI: 10.1017/S1478572214000164, Published online: 28 January 2015

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1478572214000164

How to cite this article:SARAH COLLINS (2015). The Composer as ‘Good European’: Musical Modernism, Amor fati andthe Cosmopolitanism of Frederick Delius. Twentieth-Century Music, 12, pp 97-123 doi:10.1017/S1478572214000164

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Twentieth-Century Music 12/1, 97–123 C© Cambridge University Press, 2015doi: 10.1017/S1478572214000164

The Composer as ‘Good European’: Musical Modernism, Amorfati and the Cosmopolitanism of Frederick Delius

SARAH COLLINS

AbstractThis article argues that early twentieth-century debates about both musical modernism and the idea of Europewere conditioned by prevailing attitudes towards autonomy. It will challenge the current rendering of modernistautonomy as depoliticized by showing how the attribution of ‘cosmopolitan’ characteristics to the music andpersona of Frederick Delius indicated both an absence of affiliation and a definitive marker of Englishness.Underpinning this argument is the idea that attending to the dialectical interplay between independence andcooperation in the notion of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ can offer a model for a renewed conception of autonomy andcommitment in musical modernism. Delius’s devotion to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, and Nietzsche’s ownanalysis of European nihilism, will act as the backdrop to this discussion and help to suggest how both ‘Europe’and musical modernism can be understood – via the notion of cosmopolitanism – as dispositions extending beyondtheir conventional geographical and historical demarcations.

Contemporary debates about the idea of Europe and contemporary debates about musical

modernism have some surprising features in common. For example, proponents of renewal

in both cases have sought to revise the technocratic characterization of their respective

subjects; both debates involve weighing the relative merits of detachment and engagement –

namely, independence and cooperation, on the one hand, and autonomy and commitment,

on the other; and both are shot through with Cold War politics. These equivalences may

suggest a continuity between political and aesthetic anxieties, such that historicizing their

relationship may yield insights into underlying structures of thought and argument. In what

follows, I will explore this possibility by examining the historical attribution of ‘cosmopolitan’

characteristics to the music and persona of Frederick Delius in the early twentieth century,

construing the post-Victorian ambivalence towards cosmopolitanism as a precursor to

contemporary British euroscepticism. I will argue that Delius’s reception as a cosmopolitan

reflected a hermeneutics of musical modernism that was predicated upon the association

of musical autonomy with other, non-aesthetic types of detachment – an association that

continues to condition the disciplinary treatment of musical modernism in Anglo-American

musicology today.

Further, I will suggest how autonomy functioned in a dialectical relationship with

commitment in modernism, drawing upon the notion of ‘rooted’ cosmopolitanism, and

showing how Delius’s purported absence of affiliation came to be seen, in fact, as a definitive

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98 Collins The Composer as ‘Good European’

indication of his Englishness. This type of reading challenges the current rendering of

modernist autonomy as depoliticized and disengaged, a narrative which is itself a product of

the post-war institutionalization of modernism. Delius’s devotion to the writings of Friedrich

Nietzsche, and Nietzsche’s own analysis of European nihilism, will act as the backdrop to

this discussion, and help to suggest that both ‘Europe’ and musical modernism can be

understood – via the notion of cosmopolitanism – as attitudes that take them well beyond

their usual geographical and historical points of closure.

Underpinning this argument is the idea that attending to the dialectical interplay between

independence and cooperation in the notion of ‘rooted’ cosmopolitanism can offer a model

for a renewed conception of autonomy and commitment in musical modernism.

Euroscepticism and ‘Modernism Bashing’A decade ago, in the second issue of this journal, Bjorn Heile described a prevailing scepticism

towards musical modernism in English-language musicology, and made a bid for renewal.

One factor contributing to the stigmatization of musical modernism, according to Heile, was

the tendency to consider Anglo-American musicology as normative, with non-English music

studies representing ‘deviations that primarily reflect their particular cultural background’.1

This disciplinary tendency has meant construing musical modernism – which was commonly

seen as having been rooted in continental Europe – from an ‘outsider’s perspective’, as being

foreign or Other, resulting in a ‘degree of distancing and often to a defence of national

traditions against the perceived threat of an internationalized avant garde’.2 More recently,

Paul Harper-Scott articulated a similar concern, highlighting how the perception of musical

modernism within Anglo-American musicology has been largely conditioned by an ‘end of

history’ paradigm, in the sense that:

every intellectual and political current in Europe in the nineteenth century was

building inexorably towards the catastrophes of the twentieth century, since which

point Europe has been in terminal decline and is now economically, politically,

militarily, and morally defunct. The victor of history is the American political-

economic model, and no alternative can be imagined. Any views to the contrary

are merely ‘ideological’: implicitly or explicitly, the idea has grown that we live in a

post-ideological age.3

According to this narrative, Europe’s purported foreignness is compounded by the taint of

ideology, in contrast to the ideological purity of the Anglophone outlook. Musical modernism,

conceived as a product of continental Europe by a discipline predicated on this ‘end of history’

narrative, has thus been equated with decline, and as being antithetical to historical progress.

1 Bjorn Heile, ‘Darmstadt as Other: British and American Responses to Musical Modernism’, Twentieth-Century Music

1/2 (2004), 161.

2 Heile, ‘Darmstadt as Other’, 176.

3 J. P. E. Harper-Scott, The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism: Revolution, Reaction and William Walton (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2012) 20.



Collins The Composer as ‘Good European’ 99

Musical modernism has also been associated with practices of objectification and

abstraction, which have furnished accusations of artificiality. For example, Heile noted

that it had become common to associate musical modernism with ‘technical innovation,

structural coherence, and a scientistic rationalization of composition [ . . . ] shutting itself

off hermetically from any kind of outside influence, be it historical, cultural, or social’.4

Underpinning these associations is an understanding of musical modernism as making an

undifferentiated claim to a position of autonomy. This claim has been understood to include

the notion of ‘absolute music’ and questions about the possibility or desirability of musical

representation, as well as related problems of analysis and interpretation. It also implies

an ethical position whereby music is held to be an end in itself, with no social content or

responsibility. In addition, autonomy has been construed as invoking the notion that an

artist is able to stand outside of history, implying the possibility of validity claims beyond the

local and subjective – a notion that came to be seen as dangerously authoritarian according

to the discourse of postmodernity. In its most severe form, autonomy involved the denial

of a work’s historical situatedness, and the development of practices and techniques of

composition designed to ensure music’s detachment from its context.

With the ‘new’ musicology being committed to understanding music’s constitutive role in

society, and wary of formalism’s past misdemeanours, the association of musical modernism

with these kinds of claims to autonomy incited what Heile described as a ‘vogue of modernism

bashing’.5 Modernism is thereby routinely associated with the decadence and elitism of the

early twentieth century, with extremist right-wing politics in the mid-twentieth century,

and with the subversion of Anglo-American liberal democracy and global capitalism in the

later twentieth century. It has to this extent been a victim of its own rhetoric: of historical

rupture, internationalism, detachment and abstraction, objectification and theory. At a

more fundamental level, however, its current maligning in musicology reflects an ongoing

disciplinary anxiety with practices of autonomy.

This anxiety is not only confined to specialized discourses, but can also been seen in the

broader public sphere, as exemplified in current debates about the idea of Europe. Twice

a year, the European Commission conducts a survey of how the ordinary people of its

member states feel about the institution of the European Union. Over the last eight years, the

‘Eurobarometer’, as it is known, has shown an overall drop in ‘positive’ associations with the

‘image of the EU’ (from 50 per cent to 35 per cent);6 in ‘trust in the European Union’ (from 38

per cent to 31 per cent);7 and in optimistic feelings about the ‘future of the EU’ (from 69 per

cent to 56 per cent).8 While these results tend to obscure national-level fluctuations (some

of which record an increase in support for the EU over this period), there is undoubtedly



6 ‘Standard Eurobarometer 81/Spring 2014: Public Opinion in the European Union, First Results’, conducted by

TNS Opinion & Social at the request of the European Commission, July, 6, http://ec.europa.eu/citizenship/pdf/

spring˙eurobarometer˙july˙2014.pdf (accessed 20 September 2014).

7 ‘Standard Eurobarometer’, 9.

8 ‘Standard Eurobarometer’, 10.

http://ec.europa.eu/citizenship/pdf/spring_eurobarometer_july_2014.pdf





a developed rhetoric of ‘crisis’ in relation to the idea of Europe today – an impression

strengthened by the unprecedented gains of the ‘eurosceptic’ parties (from France, Britain,

and Denmark), and populist voices, in the most recent European parliamentary elections of

May 2014.

In response to the election results, Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte was reported to say

that Europe needs ‘fewer rules and less fuss’ and should focus on ‘where it can add value

to things’. British prime minister David Cameron responded similarly, saying that ‘Europe

should concentrate on what matters, on growth and jobs, and not try to do so much.’9

The tenor of these kinds of calls for reform undoubtedly reflects the contracting, nationalist

politics of recession, which emphasizes the local or particularized, the practical and the

immediate, rather than the normative, abstract, or idealist. In this context, ‘less fuss’ and

focusing on ‘what matters’ appear as a muted bids for less intellectualism and technocracy in

the EU – for less form and more content, as it were.

England’s (and more problematically, Britain’s) relationship with the idea of Europe has

always been particularly vexed, and indeed some have argued that contemporary English

nationalism primarily defines itself in the negative – that is, against the idea of Europe.10

The sense that the ‘crisis’ of faith in the idea of Europe is due to its failure to attend to the

immediate concerns of the people, and its technocratic character, was polemically expressed

over a decade earlier in a more extremist form by the aging Margaret Thatcher, who famously

described Europe as a ‘classic utopian project, a monument to the vanity of intellectuals’.11

Contrasting European integration with American unification, Thatcher wrote that ‘Europe

was a result of plans’ as opposed to the ‘events’ and ‘necessities’ that helped forge the

USA, and indeed that ‘it was the liberal democratic values of the English-speaking peoples,

spearheaded from Washington, which proved the ultimate antidote to communism’.12 Here,

in a clear alignment with the problematic associations that have attended musical modernism,

we see ‘Europe’ being cast as constructed and elitist, laden with ideology, and divorced from

9 Paul Taylor and Luke Baker, ‘After Seismic Elections, EU leaders Assess Damage’, Reuters UK, 28 May

2014, http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/05/27/uk-eu-election-summit-idUKKBN0E70ZN20140527 (accessed 10

June 2014).

10 For example, Ben Wellings has written that ‘Euroscpeticism [sic] is in all but name English nationalism’ (‘Losing the

Peace: Euroscepticism and the Foundations of Contemporary English Nationalism’, Nations and Nationalism 16/3

(2010), 503). Wellings also deals in detail with the conflation of ‘British’ and ‘English’ in debates about Europe,

and the complex interaction between eurosceptics and Scottish and Welsh secessionists. He concludes that ‘English

nationalism [ . . . ] still characteristically speaks the language of Britishness’ (503). Still, it seems likely that these

distinctions will become increasingly marked in the wake of the Scottish referendum of September 2014 – which

returned only a narrow victory to the ‘Better Together’ campaign. It remains to be seen how Scotland’s vote against

independence will impact British euroscepticism more broadly, especially with regards to the role of the mostly

pro-Europe Scottish vote in the promised British referendum on EU membership.

11 Margaret Thatcher, ‘Europe Has Always Meant Trouble’, Times, 18 March 2002, 2, which reproduced an extract from

Thatcher’s book Stagecraft: Strategies for a Changing World (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002). John Campbell has

noted that this ‘sensational demarche’, as he called it, was roundly condemned ‘across the political spectrum’, including

by ‘paid-up Eurosceptics like Michael Howard’ (John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher (London: Vintage, 2007), 797.

12 Quoted in ‘Thatcher’s Thoughts on Europe’ Times, 19 March 2002, 4.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/05/27/uk-eu-election-summit-idUKKBN0E70ZN20140527




historical realities. Its purported artificiality and foreignness were pitted against the seeming

organic naturalness, or ideologically neutral Anglophone ‘antidote’.

Thatcher’s neo-liberal emphasis on individualism during her time in office was co-opted

by debates about English parliamentary sovereignty during the late 1970s and 1980s, serving

as a catalyst to the development of contemporary euroscepticism. Thatcher’s casting of

individualism as a defining element of English history and national sensibility was particularly

influential in the context of these debates, allowing an ideology of personal self-determination

to serve the argument for political self-determination in the broader context of Britain’s

membership of the European Economic Community (EEC). The linking of individualism

with English national character has made ‘ever closer union’ with Europe seem antithetical

to the natural progress of history,13 and has ensured that the notion that ‘a government

should step in and replace organic and spontaneous relationships with regimentation from

above’ has been construed as ‘alien to the Anglo-Saxon tradition’.14 The spectre of an ‘alien’

imposition upon an ‘organic’ creation – or the idea that a constructed, or abstracted system

disrupts the historical continuity of national growth from below – evokes very clearly the

imagery of modernist rupture associated with continental Decadence, and the practices of

objectification and detachment involved in its associated lifestyles, designed as they were to

be ‘against nature’ in a variety of ways.15

As a counter-force to these damaging associations, there have been recent calls for

renewal in relation to both musical modernism and the idea of Europe. With regards to

the former, renewal has generally been sought by claiming that autonomy operated in a

dialectical relationship with social engagement, rather than in opposition. Gianmario Borio’s

contribution to the recent roundtable on ‘Modernism and its Others’, published in the Journal

of the Royal Musical Association,16 gives a timely historicization of this argument. Borio locates

its origins in a debate about the extent to which the arts should evidence ‘commitment’ to

social concerns in the wake of the cultural policy of the Soviet bloc, involving Jean-Paul

Satre, Rene Leibowitz, Luigi Nono, Adorno, and Umberto Eco during the 1950s, 1960s

and 1970s.17 Borio argues that despite the outward rejection of modernist autonomy in

the post-war context, it has in fact persisted in dialectical relation to commitment; for

example, in the championing of artistic liberty against state intervention, or against the

influence of commercial or ‘market’ interests in music production. This new casting would

allow for the transformation of the modernist disposition of autonomy from what had been

perceived as a decadent renunciation of ethical responsibility into a critical force for liberation

against hegemonic norms. This transformation aims to position autonomy as an attitude of

critical distance that is positively necessary to maintaining democratic communication. Thus

13 And indeed, in an effort to appease his eurosceptic colleagues, David Cameron has sought to remove the reference to

‘ever closer union’ in the preamble to the Lisbon Treaty, though so far without success.

14 Margaret Thatcher, ‘Nation, State, Government, People’, speech in Houston, Texas, 2 September 1977, quoted in

Wellings, ‘Losing the Peace’, 494–5.

15 In the sense described in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s A rebours (1884) and other decadent texts.

16 Laura Tunbridge, ed., ‘Round Table: Modernism and its Others’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 139/1 (2014).

17 Gianmario Borio, ‘Musical Communication and the Process of Modernity’, JRMA 139/1 (2014).




detachment itself can be viewed as a form of ‘commitment’, whereby private experimentation

is acknowledged as necessary for the dynamic functioning of a polity.

Reflecting a similar agenda to these recent calls for renewed perspectives on musical

modernism, Jurgen Habermas earlier cast autonomy as being central to democratic

communication. Habermas draws out a counter-narrative for the role of autonomy in

modernity, casting it not as a withdrawal from reason tout court, but as a critique of

subject-centred reason that offers in its place a form of ‘inter-subjective’ or ‘communicative’

reason. Against the narrative of postmodernity regarding the impossibility of validity claims,

Habermas imagines a level of objectivity that can operate beyond the local and subjective –

and beyond the contingencies of language – which is therefore capable of being productively

debated.18

Habermas’s conception of the role of autonomy in modernity also plays out in his calls

to renew the idea of Europe in terms of a dialectic of detachment and engagement –

or in his notion of the ‘cosmopolitan citizen’. As a prominent advocate of European

integration, Habermas has argued that current constructions of the idea of Europe – as

being in opposition to nationalism, or as an absence of affiliation rather than as an ‘actually

existing’ political collectivity – focus upon its purely technocratic characterization, noting

that ‘Europe cannot take hold in the consciousness of its citizens simply in the shape of a

common currency’.19 At the height of the Eurozone crisis, Habermas was stridently critical

of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s political manoeuvring that ensured that the European

Central Bank’s financial bailout of the ‘southern countries’ of Europe was contingent upon

the implementation of stringent austerity measures. Habermas called Merkel’s actions

‘duplicitous’ and ‘opportunistic’ in the sense that it showed that Germany was happy to

accept a role as a leading power in Europe without accepting responsibility for its role in the

crisis. In other words, its actions were driven by a nationalistic impulse of self-interest, rather

than as a citizen of a European polity: ‘her public persona seems to lack any normative core’.20

Habermas presents a direct challenge to the characterization of European institutions

as artificial impositions upon an organically formed polity, by highlighting the level of

intentionality that is involved in citizenship:

Eurosceptics reject a shift in the basis of legitimation of the Union from international

treaties to a European constitution with the argument, ‘there is as yet no European

people’. According to this view, what is missing is the very subject of a constituent

process, the collective singular of ‘a people’ capable of defining itself as a democratic

nation. I have criticized this ‘no-demos’ thesis on both conceptual and empirical

grounds.

18 See Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence

(Cambridge: Polity, 1987).

19 Jurgen Habermas, ‘Why Europe Needs a Constitution’, New Left Review 11 (2001), 6.

20 Jurgen Habermas, ‘Merkel’s European Failure: Germany Dozes on a Volcano’, Spiegel Online International,

9 August 2013, trans. Christopher Sultan, www.spiegel.de/international/germany/juergen-habermas-merkel-needs-to-

confront-real-european-reform-a-915244.html.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/juergen-habermas-merkel-needs-to-confront-real-european-reform-a-915244.html





A nation of citizens must not be confused with a community of fate shaped

by common descent, language and history. This confusion fails to capture the

voluntaristic character of a civic nation, the collective identity of which exists neither

independent of nor prior to the democratic process from which it springs. Such

a civic, as opposed to ethnic, conception of ‘the nation’ reflects both the actual

historical trajectory of the European nation-states and the fact that democratic

citizenship establishes an abstract, legally mediated solidarity between strangers.21

Articulating an ideal of the ‘cosmopolitan citizen’, Habermas charts a middle-way between

national and global identification, or between self-sovereignty and cooperation. The

‘cosmopolitan citizen’ is part of a world community of supranational associations, wherein

‘the member states retain control over the means for a legitimate use of force, though not the

right to use them as they please’.22 Habermas’s notion of the ‘cosmopolitan citizen’ in this sense

has been considerably sharpened in recent literature from across the humanities dealing with

the concept of cosmopolitanism as both a critical attitude and a viable political alternative.

Through this literature (which will be considered below), the conventional perception of the

cosmopolitan as a detached – and therefore potentially subversive – champion of modernist

autonomy has been revised to highlight the ethical position involved in this attitude.

Given the striking similarities between current debates about musical modernism and

those about the idea of Europe, it is surprising that the dialectical position latent in these

new conceptualizations of cosmopolitanism has not garnered closer scrutiny as a model for

a renewed view of musical modernism. In what follows, I aim to make a start at drawing

together these two realms of discourse, by looking at the historical intermingling of debates

about detachment and affiliation as they related to cosmopolitanism, on the one hand, and

conceptions of autonomy and engagement as they related to musical modernism, on the other.

By examining attributions of cosmopolitan characteristics to Delius in this manner, I aim to

highlight the existence of an interlocking series of anxieties that may point to the potential

of considering cosmopolitanism as a model for reimagining autonomy and commitment

in musical modernism. In addition, the recognition of these interlocking discourses should

strengthen the calls for the reconceptualization of modernism as an ‘outlook’ or continuing

essence that extends beyond its historical demarcation and suggests that modernism offers a

category for investigation that can be a powerful alternative to normative notions of musical

identity based on nationality, ethnicity, or gender.

Locating DeliusA century ago, the English composer-critic Philip Heseltine (better known by his pseudonym

Peter Warlock) published an article in The Musical Times titled ‘Some Notes on Delius and

His Music’.23 The article’s impact was such that eighty-two years later, the journal saw fit

21 Habermas, ‘Why Europe Needs a Constitution’ 15–16.

22 Jurgen Habermas, The Crisis of the European Union: A Response, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 58.

23 Philip Heseltine, ‘Some Notes on Delius and His Music’, The Musical Times 56 (1915).




to republish it under the modified title of ‘The Good European’, noting its significance in

terms of paving the way for a more sympathetic reception of Delius’s music.24 In the article,

Heseltine observed that Frederick Delius’s

position in the musical world of to-day is one of curious isolation; he has ever held

aloof from the great public, and it is scarcely surprising that he is regarded with

a certain bewilderment, as a mysterious, enigmatic, albeit, [ . . . ] a very arresting,

figure.25

According to Heseltine, Delius’s isolation was compounded by what he termed the ‘elusive

problem of his nationality’.26

Delius was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, in 1862 to parents who had emigrated to Britain

from Germany twenty years before his birth and had become British nationals. Delius lived

primarily in Britain until the age of twenty-two, and indeed his Yorkshire upbringing should

have attracted strong provincial associations in his critical reception during the inter-war

period, given the artistic currency of the ‘myth of the North’.27 At twenty-two he moved to

an orange plantation in Florida, then to Leipzig for musical training, then to Paris, finally

settling in Grez-sur-Loing. He also often travelled to Norway, had many Norwegian friends,

and developed a strong love of Norwegian poetry, music, landscape, and mythology.

Delius’s Teutonic ancestry (or as Heseltine put it, ‘the superstition that he is really a

German’)28 would have made him an easy target for criticism in 1915, when Heseltine’s

article was written. Yet even earlier, Delius’s reception in Britain was marked by a pervasive

confusion over his national identity. When Delius presented a self-funded concert of his

own works in London in 1899 for example, the press coverage was oddly preoccupied with

the composer’s ‘foreign parentage’ or ‘foreign extraction’, his extensive travels to America,

Germany, and Scandinavia, and the broad range of the source material for his works, including

24 Philip Heseltine, ‘From the Archive: A Good European’, The Musical Times 138 (1997).

25 Heseltine, ‘Some Notes on Delius and His Music’, 137.


27 See J. P. E. Harper-Scott, ‘“Our True North”: Walton’s First Symphony, Sibelianism, and the Nationalization of

Modernism in England’, Music & Letters 89/4 (2008). Harper-Scott draws from the work of Michael Saler, Peter

Davidson, and Jed Esty – who each have highlighted the artisanal, masculine, and nationalist associations of the

North of England for artists and writers of late modernism (as a counter to the mass cultures of the ‘cosmopolitan

South’) – to explore similar associations for composers such as William Walton, and in relation to English Sibelianism

generally. Delius himself certainly played into the perceived association between masculinity and national character:

‘At the end of next month I intend going to Norway for a 3 weeks walking tour in the mountains – Doesn’t it tempt

you? I love Norway & the Norwegian peasants. I consider Percy Grainger the most gifted English composer & he is an

Australian – there is something of the old English robustness & vigor in his music – that part of England which has long

ago ceased to exist or which has emigrated’ (Frederick Delius, letter to Philip Heseltine, 23 June 1912, quoted in Barry

Smith (ed.) Frederick Delius and Peter Warlock: A Friendship Revealed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 37–8

(original emphasis). See also the discussion below regarding the nationalist implications of Delius’s ‘business-like’

appearance.





American novels, German poetry, and Norwegian plays.29 Even sympathetic reviewers felt it

necessary to comment upon this seemingly pivotal facet of Delius’s compositional persona,

one critic writing: ‘Moreover, although of German parentage, and a pupil of the Leipzig

and Paris Conservatories, Mr. Delius was born and brought up in Yorkshire, and therefore

his abilities should be recognized in this country.’30 Arthur Symons, in response to one of

Beecham’s concerts in 1908, wrote that he had ‘heard no recent English music so expressive,

so full of somber poetry’ – a point of distinction that the continentally inspired Symons

attributed to ‘Delius’s un-English quality of mind’.31

The ‘elusive problem of [Delius’s] nationality’ continued to characterize the reception of

his music after the war, and still persists today. In a review article written in 1927, a critic noted

that ‘there is [even] a foreign character in [Delius’s] handwriting, and it will be observed that

he spells “characteristic” in the manner of the Latin languages, also that he breaks the word in

a way that one accustomed to think and write in English would never adopt (characte-ristic)’.32

Lionel Carley explicitly cast Delius as a ‘cosmopolitan’ in his 1983 publication of Delius’s life

and letters;33 this characterization is echoed in the subtitle to Christopher Palmer’s 1976 text

on Delius, ‘Portrait of a Cosmopolitan’;34 and it persists even in incidental remarks such as

Byron Adams’s comment that Delius ‘was English only by accident of birth, for in all other

ways he was a deeply cosmopolitan composer’.35

The pervasiveness of the critical trope of cosmopolitanism in the literature on Delius is

striking, and it is often partnered with questions about whether or not he can be claimed as

an English composer. In 1922 Sydney Grew began an article on Delius by writing:

What is it makes a man an Englishman? If his parents were German, though settled

in England and naturalized there, and their son born in England, if he himself from

the age of twenty-two or twenty-three has lived mostly in France; if, moreover, most

of his creative work has been done to subjects other than English, and if his own

intellectual processes are sometimes scarcely English, so much so indeed that when

he writes in English he almost suggests that it is something of a foreign language

to him; if he is famous early in life on the Continent but practically unknown in

the land of his birth until well on in middle age; and if he is, after thirty years, still

partly a problem to the professional musicologists of England – is he, in view of these

considerations, an English musician?36

29 Press comments reported in Lionel Carley, ed., Frederick Delius: Music, Art and Literature (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998),

2–4.

30 ‘Mr. Fritz Delius’, The Musical Times 40 (1899), 472 (emphasis added).

31 Arthur Symons, ‘On Some Modern Music’, The Saturday Review, 7 March 1908, 297.

32 Sydney Grew, ‘Delius (born 1863)’, British Musician 2/8 (1927), 300.

33 Frederick Delius, A Life in Letters, 1862–1934, ed. Lionel Carley (London: Scholar in association with the Delius Trust,

1983).

34 Christopher Palmer, Delius: Portrait of a Cosmopolitan (London: Duckworth, 1976).

35 Byron Adams, ‘“No Armpits, Please, We’re British”: Whitman and English Music, 1884–1936’, in Lawrence Kramer,

ed., Walt Whitman and Modern Music: War Desire, and the Trials of Nationhood (New York: Garland, 2000), 37.

36 Sydney Grew, ‘Frederick Delius’, The Sackbut 3/3 (1922), 67 (emphasis added).




Answering this question in the affirmative, Grew proceeded to discuss a number of Delius’s

works that the critic considered to be in fact ‘more English than that of any other composer’,37

and others that supposedly had ‘the same mental and spiritual tone of our race’.38

Basil Hogarth reflected with exasperation in 1934 that ‘much polemical ink has been spilt

disputing the exact proportions of English characteristics in the music of Frederick Delius’,

though he also noted ‘there can be no doubt that Delius was essentially an Englishman by

birth, breeding, and temperament. His accent, with its suggestion of the Yorkshire Pennines;

his reserve and distrust of artistic cliques and coteries were in keeping with his Northern

origin.’39

The paradoxical scenario that saw Delius conceived as simultaneously foreign – in national

allegiance, in mindset, and in written expression – but yet unassailably English – in breeding,

temperament, spirit, and selected works – is difficult to account for. Robert Stradling has

viewed instances of Delius’s English characterization as part of a politically inflected and

calculated effort on the part of figures such as Heseltine, Gray, and Beecham to effect a

posthumous repatriation of the composer (both conceptually and literally – Delius’s body

was moved from Grez and re-interred in a small churchyard in Surrey).40 The confusion

over Delius’s status of affiliation was also no doubt spurred by the fact that he was fairly

mature by the time his music was heard with any regularity in English concert halls, giving the

impression that he had emerged from nowhere – fully formed, as it were – rather than growing

organically out of his national and historical context. Yet while the peculiarities in Delius’s

reception continue to frustrate attempts to ‘locate’ his music historically (especially given the

prevailing methodological nationalism of music history), they may also bear witness to the

remarkable intersection of political, aesthetic, and ethical discourses in the post-Victorian

music sphere. Delius’s reception may suggest, for example, the extent to which the language of

political and social theory was appropriated by music critics who found themselves grappling

with an unprecedented pluralism in musical style, and with questions regarding critical

authority in determining the character of musical progress. In particular, it can show how

the notion of cosmopolitanism was actively mobilized in relation to Delius not only to signal

a political and cultural position, but also to describe a particular attitude – a distanced or

detached persona – which applied to both music composition and music criticism.

In viewing this paradox as an opening rather than a closure – as being fecund with

interpretative insight and opportunity rather than as a site of incommensurability – we

must come to an understanding of cosmopolitanism as something other than a matter

of nationality, language or spirit. Delius’s apparent transgression of public borders of

nationhood was partnered with his ambiguous position in relation to a number of imaginary

private borders which continued to hold a striking cultural currency, such as between the

aesthetic and the athletic, between the feminine sensitive and the masculine robust, and

37 Grew, ‘Frederick Delius’, 67.

38 Grew, ‘Frederick Delius’, 67.

39 Basil Hogarth, ‘Frederick Delius: A Critical Estimate’, The English Review (1934), 154.

40 Robert Stradling, ‘On Shearing the Black Sheep in Spring: The Repatriation of Frederick Delius’, in Christopher

Norris, ed., Music and the Politics of Culture (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989).




between passionate engagement and detachment. Embedded within these dualisms were

also competing conceptions of history and methods of interpretation and analysis. For

example, types of analysis that atomize, fragment, and particularize their object were often

pitted against more ‘cosmopolitan’ types that synthesize, unify, generalize, and abstract. And

methods of history that forward teleological narratives of national development were pitted

against genealogical or episodic approaches. These debates also touched music criticism, such

as can be seen in the debate between Ernest Newman, on the one hand, who believed that

musical greatness sprang from its time and was always recognized in its own time, and Cecil

Gray, on the other hand, who believed that genius was above any temporal or geographical

demarcation.41 In the former case a composer’s work was evaluated according to the extent to

which it contributed to and was expressive of its time and place in a national context, and in the

latter, music was evaluated according to the extent to which it represented a contribution to

all times and all places – namely, its status as an immortal artwork. These underlying agenda

complicate discussions of Delius’s cosmopolitanism and Englishness respectively, though

they also provide an opportunity to historicize the contemporary concern for exploring

‘post-national’ or ‘global’ perspectives, and to interrogate the interaction between ideas

about musical modernism and questions of affiliation more broadly.

The Double-Edged Nature of CosmopolitanismIn recent years there has been an immense proliferation of cosmopolitanism studies, including

in political philosophy, cultural theory, sociology, anthropology, and literary criticism. These

have ranged from theoretical explorations of the nature and elements of different types of

cosmopolitanism historically, to empirical studies of cosmopolitanism as a lived experience

(namely, ‘cosmopolitanism in practice’ or ‘actually existing cosmopolitanism’), as well as

ideologically and philosophically motivated investigations of cosmopolitanism as a political

alternative.42 Within this extensive literature, cosmopolitanism has been construed variously

as an ethico-political programme, a sociocultural condition, an attitude or disposition, and,

ultimately, as a scholarly methodology. In ethnomusicology, cosmopolitanism has appeared

as a productive model when considering the global circulation of musical repertories, moving

beyond postcolonial anxieties regarding authority, appropriation, and authenticity, towards

41 For a discussion of this debate, see Sarah Collins, ‘“Never Out of Date and Never Modern”: Aesthetic Democracy,

Radical Music Criticism, and The Sackbut’, Music & Letters 95/3 (2014). The original exchange occurred across three

articles: Cecil Gray, ‘The Task of Criticism’, The Sackbut 1/1 (1920), 9–13; Ernest Newman, ‘A Note on Musical

Criticism’, Sunday Times, 30 May 1920, 6; and Cecil Gray, ‘A Critique of Pure Cant: Being an Earnest Enquiry into the

Nature of the New Man’, The Sackbut 1/3 (1920), 112–15.

42 See, in particular, four important collections of essays: Martha Nussbaum, Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua

Cohen (Boston: Beacan, 1996); Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah, eds, Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the

Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha,

and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Cosmopolitanism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); and Steven Vertovec and

Robin Cohen, Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).




renewed notions of agency and exchange.43 And, more recently, Dana Gooley has drawn the

topic of cosmopolitanism directly into the purview of historical musicology of the nineteenth

century, observing a marked absence of critical reflection on notions of cosmopolitanism

from the time, despite substantial scholarly interest in the historical relationship between

music and national identity.44

Part of the difficulty of conceiving cosmopolitanism in the context of historical musicology,

Gooley notes, may be ‘identifying its location or site’ – for example, whether it should

be viewed in terms of patterns of behaviour (particularly in relation to travel and

communication), compositional techniques and musical style, repertoire and institutions,

or in the lives and outlooks of professional musicians.45 In view of this difficulty, Delius’s

reception as a cosmopolitan in early twentieth-century Britain may suggest a surprising

absence of delineation between these ‘locations’ or ‘sites’ in practice, demonstrating instead

the multilevel operation of cosmopolitanism.

Historical conceptions of cosmopolitanism in Britain served as ideological precursors to

modern euroscepticism, and had a direct impact on the emergence and reception of an artistic

consciousness associated with late Victorianism and British modernism. Esther Wohlgemut

has traced the impact in the British political sphere of Kant’s Enlightenment conception

of cosmopolitanism. For Kant, the purpose of human reason was to progress humankind

towards Enlightenment, and although the micro-histories of individuals and communities

seemed to suggest a blind and chaotic development, the broader concept of ‘universal history’

could reveal the underlying teleological progression of reason. This broader view of history

to reveal the constitutive role of reason in a gradual progression towards Enlightenment

describes the ‘cosmopolitan purpose’ of human actions, and therefore ethical behaviour can

be determined by its contribution to this overarching ‘cosmopolitan purpose’ of universal

history.46 Wohlgemut notes that although Kant believed that every individual had the capacity

to reason autonomously, it was the public use of reason that drove the development of this

capacity:

Enlightenment as the uncompleted emergence of reason overlaps with the

cosmopolitan purpose of universal history. In particular, both extend beyond the

individual: ‘There is more chance of an entire public enlightening itself ’ Kant claims,

than of an individual throwing off the ‘ball and chain of his permanent immaturity’

[ . . . ] Understood in this way, the realization of enlightenment is co-terminus with

the realization of cosmopolitan purpose.47

43 See Martin Stokes, ‘On Musical Cosmopolitanism’, The Mancalester International Roundtable 2007, Paper 3,

http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/intlrdtable/3 (accessed 1 October 2014).

44 Dana Gooley, ‘Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Nationalism, 1848–1914’, Journal of the American Musicological Society

66/2 (2013).

45 Gooley, ‘Cosmopolitanism’, 525–6.

46 Esther Wohlgemut, Romantic Cosmopolitanism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 13–14.

47 Wohlgemut, Romantic Cosmopolitanism, 14, quoting Kant’s ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose

(1784)’.

http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/intlrdtable/3




So while, for Kant, the autonomous individual or community can utilize their capacity to

reason in order to progress towards Enlightenment, overall this capacity was enhanced by

its communal expression across humankind. In addition, while universal laws of ethics were

internal to and accessible by such autonomous individuals rather than being relative to

historical or cultural situatedness (the notion which underpins the concept of immutable

human rights), the exercise of behaviour in accordance with these universal laws must accord

with the ‘cosmopolitan purpose’ of human history.

With this dual emphasis on the autonomy of the individual in his or her capacity to reason

and access universal laws, on the one hand, and the significance of the broader conception of

human progression, on the other, it is perhaps not surprising that Kant’s thought in this area

became an instrument of both nationalist and cosmopolitan agendas. Here the notions of

individual freedom, equality, and self-determination that became central to the emergence

of the modern nation were joined with the Enlightenment concept of the ‘original contract’,

which described how these aspects of individual (or national) fulfilment could only be fully

achieved in their relationship to the global whole.48

Wohlgemut observes the impact of Kant’s political philosophy on debates that emerged

in Britain in the wake of the French Revolution, especially that between Edmund Burke

and Richard Price. One of the curious aspects of the debate at this historical juncture

(namely, in ‘wartime Britain’) is the emergence of a stigma of suspicion attached to

cosmopolitanism – a stigma that later re-emerged with renewed force in the wake of the First

World War, impacting Delius directly.49 In Burke’s vitriolic attacks against cosmopolitanism

or international cooperation of any kind, he developed an imagery that has been appropriated

by eurosceptic and modernism-sceptic causes alike. This was an imagery articulated through

a vision of Britain as an organic outcome of its historical continuity, in opposition to the

artificial abstraction of the ideals of the new French constitution.50 Burke cast Price’s pro-

cooperation stance as the

counterfeit wares which some persons, by a double fraud, export to you in illicit

bottoms, as raw commodities of British growth though wholly alien to our soil, in

order afterwards to smuggle them back again into this country, manufactured after

the newest Paris fashion of an improved liberty.51

Burke’s casting of international cooperation or cosmopolitanism in this salacious light, and

as being threatening to national solidarity, drove the position’s association with Jacobinism:

48 Wohlgemut, Romantic Cosmopolitanism, 15.

49 For example, Stradling noted how ‘Heseltine’s description of Delius as a “cosmopolitan” was now [in the 1930s]

turned to the disadvantage of the cause. Indeed, the word had acquired fresh and disturbing overtones since the use

of it by the composer’s disciple’, and that ‘use of the word “cosmopolitan” remained (until Palmer’s study) a token of

disfavor amongst the critics’ (‘On Shearing the Black Sheep in Spring’, 84–5).

50 Wohlgemut, Romantic Cosmopolitanism, 25–8.

51 Wohlgemut, Romantic Cosmopolitanism, 25, quoting Burke’s Reflections (1790).




‘for Burke, national belonging begins with love of hearth and home and not with the universal

rights of man’.52

This kind of scepticism towards cosmopolitanism continued well into the nineteenth

and twentieth centuries, including, as Rebecca Walkowitz has observed, among ‘British

writers opposing German militarism, Irish writers opposing British rule, socialist writers

suspicious of rootlessness, fascist writers suspicious of individualism, and postcolonial

writers suspicious of non-Europeans who address European audiences’.53 Nevertheless, the

status of cosmopolitanism in public discourse was by no means consistent. Studies in late

Victorian literature in particular have driven a substantial shift in our understanding of

cosmopolitanism in recent years. There are three interrelated concepts that have come

out of this new work that are of the most immediate relevance for the present purposes,

each of which problematize and nuance traditional dichotomies between nationalism and

cosmopolitanism. These three interrelated readings of cosmopolitanism will assist us with

demonstrating how Delius acted as an example of the enmeshing of discourses on nationalism,

musical modernism, and artistic persona.

The first is the notion of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ or ‘new cosmopolitanism’, which

opposes the universalism of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and rather than advocating for

an ennobled communal culture of global citizens, emphasizes respect for national differences

under an overarching humanitarian concern. ‘New cosmopolitanism’ can thus be conceived,

in fact, as a type of nationalism that simply does not conform to accepted nationalist models,

and which carries with it seemingly conflicting implications.54 As an example of the divergent

response to this kind of cosmopolitanism, Amanda Anderson has referred to the

opposing symbolism attaching to representative figures across the literature of

the [Victorian] period. The dandy, the Jew, and the fallen woman, for example,

respectively focused anxieties about ironic distance, rootlessness, and heightened

exile, while the doctor, the writer, and the professional tended to represent the

distinct promise of modernity: progressive knowledge, full comprehension of the

social totality, and the possibilities of transformative self-understanding.55

Anderson notes that some types of nineteenth-century British cosmopolitanism embraced

exposure to international cultures (such as through the Grand Tour) precisely for its

‘ennobling effects’ and its role in solidifying bonds with native Britain – in other words,

nationalistic bonds.56 This ethos could equally apply to the role of exoticism as part of a

52 Wohlgemut, Romantic Cosmopolitanism, 28.

53 Rebecca Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006),

8.

54 For a good list of sources defining ‘new’ or ‘rooted’ cosmopolitanism, see Louise Blakeney Williams, ‘Overcoming the

“Contagion of Mimicry”: The Cosmopolitan Nationalism and Modernist History of Rabindranath Tagore and W.B.

Yeats’, The American Historical Review 112/1 (2007), 70.

55 Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2001), 4.

56 Anderson, The Powers of Distance, 65.




relational process of national self-definition – namely seeking out the other in order to define

the ‘us’.

In the pre-war years, Judith Walkowitz describes a ‘double-edged cosmopolitanism’ that

shaped the response to the interpretive dancer Maud Allan in terms of a combination of

‘geopolitical associations and bodily dispositions’:

first, a pleasurable, stylized form of imaginative expatriation, associated with

privileged mobility; and second, a debased condition of deracination, hybridity,

displacement, and racial degeneration.57

After the First World War, conceptions of cosmopolitanism were shaped by ‘anti-alien

sentiment in Britain [ . . . ] fueled [by] spy stories about an “internal enemy” of moral perverts’,

and its adherents were targeted in the ‘cultural backlash against advanced thought and cultural

experimentalism’.58 Regenia Gagnier has noted a similarly ‘double-edged’ phenomenon in

relation to the Nazi persecution of gypsies in the lead up to the Second World War. She

observes that gypsies, on the one hand, were romanticized as ‘cosmopolitans from below’,

their ‘propertyless wanderings represent[ing] freedom [a different kind of mobility to Maud

Allan’s interpretative dance], closeness to nature and generosity’; yet, on the other hand, they

were grouped with criminals and vagabonds, were seen as being ‘work-shy’ and ‘asocial’, and

so antagonistic to Western notions of economic progress.59 The crux of this first notion, then,

is that the concept of cosmopolitanism is highly unstable, even within the same historical

and national milieu.

The second idea that has arisen in recent scholarship that will be useful in the present

context is a notion of cosmopolitanism used to ‘designate the domain of individual feeling

or ethics of toleration in contrast to the more geopolitical terminology of ‘inter-’ or ‘trans-

nationalism’.60 Cosmopolitanism considered in this way again encompasses a more complex

range of practices that are manifest in different spheres of intellectual activity, be they personal,

critical, cultural, or political. Regenia Gagnier’s is not merely a broadened definition of

cosmopolitanism in order to encompass this complex array of practices (or ‘subject positions’)

but rather a recognition of the closer relationship between individualism and the communal

in late Victorian commentary, in contrast to the stark dichotomy that was generated during

the twentieth century.61 She hearkens back to a time when ‘the cosmopolitan critic of the

modern nation could be a “citizen of the world” without falling into the depoliticized idealism

57 Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style, 340.

58 Judith R. Walkowitz, ‘The “Vision of Salome”: Cosmopolitanism and Erotic Dancing in Central London, 1908–1918’,

The American Historical Review 108/2 (2003), 344. Also see Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style.

59 See Regenia Gagnier, ‘Cultural Philanthropy, Gypsies, and Interdisciplinary Scholars: Dream of a Common

Language’, Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 1 (2005), 19, www.19.bbk.ac.uk/index.php/

19/article/viewFile/433/295.

60 Regenia Gagnier, ‘Good Europeans and Neo-Liberal Cosmopolitans: Ethics and Politics in Late Victorian and

Contemporary Cosmopolitanism’, Victorian Literature and Culture 38 (2010), 591.

61 See also Reginia Gagnier, Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–1920

(New York: Palgrave, 2010).

file:www.19.bbk.ac.uk/index.php/19/article/viewFile/433/295.

file:www.19.bbk.ac.uk/index.php/19/article/viewFile/433/295.




that that phrase often evokes today’.62 This recasting of cosmopolitanism in terms of a ‘domain

of individual feeling and ethical toleration’ will be useful for us in our consideration of Delius

below.

The third notion of interest is the late Victorian preoccupation with and uses of different

‘forms of detachment’ in intellectual life, of which cosmopolitanism was one manifestation.

For Amanda Anderson this preoccupation with cultivating ‘critical distance’

lies behind many Victorian aesthetic and intellectual projects, including the

emergent human sciences and allied projects of social reform; various ideals of

cosmopolitanism and disinterestedness; literary forms such as omniscient realism

and dramatic monologue; and the prevalent project of Bildung, or the self-reflexive

cultivation of character, which animated much of Victorian ethics and aesthetics,

from John Stuart Mill to Matthew Arnold and beyond.63

As with cosmopolitanism then, forms of detachment carried both positive connotations –

for example, for rigour and objectivity in scientific inquiry and scholarly critical distance –

as well as negative connotations – such as that associated with late nineteenth century

disenchantment and the alienation of industrialized modernity.

What played out in discussions of Delius’s cosmopolitanism was a curious conglomeration

of these varying cultural and political interpretations, yet it also signalled the aesthetic and

spiritual associations involved in the debate. This suggests that critical discourses about

musical modernism in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century constitute an additional,

and sometimes unrecognized, aspect of debates about cosmopolitanism at the time.

The Cosmopolitan Purpose of DetachmentIn order to map out the interactions between the disparate elements at play in Delius’s

reception, we must turn back to Heseltine’s article quoted earlier. Apart from the perceived

‘problem’ with regards to Delius’s nationality, according to Heseltine, there were also other

surface features that evidently contributed to a sense of unease in Delius’s listening public:

he is fifty years old, says that public, yet he holds no official position in the musical life

of the country; he does not teach in any of the academies, he is not even an honorary

professor or doctor of music. He never gives concerts or makes propaganda for his

music; he never conducts an orchestra, or plays an instrument in public (even Berlioz

played the tambourine!).64

Heseltine provides a link here between what we saw earlier as geographical, geo-cultural

and ethnic associations of Delius’s cosmopolitanism (namely, his foreign parentage, overseas

travel, and sympathies with broader European art), and other aspects related to Delius’s refusal

62 Gagnier, ‘Good Europeans and Neo-Liberal Cosmopolitans’, 591.

63 Anderson, The Powers of Distance, 4.

64 Heseltine, ‘Some Notes on Delius and His Music’, 137–8.




to participate in economic, commercial, cultural, and political life, which, as in the case of

the Victorian aesthetes and the inter-war gypsies, has traditionally indicated a subversive

disrespect for Western notions of economic progress, and therefore should be treated as

suspicious. Pushing beyond these surface features, however, Heseltine goes on:

From the purely musical point of view, however, nationality is not a factor that

counts for anything in the case of Delius. Indeed he himself never vaunts his English

origin, preferring to be considered a pure cosmopolitan, a ‘Good European’.65

What Heseltine is hinting at here is a concept of cosmopolitanism that has very little to do

with either national allegiances or economic participation, but rather something far more

integral to how a modern composer conceives of his artistic task. For Heseltine, Delius’s

cosmopolitanism, or rootlessness, was the very thing that positioned him as a true artist,

capable of producing masterworks that would last into perpetuity, beyond their particular

time and place (and so history and nation).

Thomas Beecham made a similar link between practices of detachment, or autonomy,

and artistic sincerity when he described Delius as possessing ‘those two supreme virtues,

honesty and independence’.66 Far from being disingenuous, thought Heseltine and Beecham,

Delius could attain the utmost sincerity in his art because he was ‘unfettered by external

considerations’ and did not have to be a ‘servant of the public’ or nation.67

In his biography of Delius, Heseltine casts the composer’s formative period on a Florida

orange plantation as emblematic of the critical purpose of Delius’s detachment:

Remote from the false culture and superficial distractions of modern civilization he

was free at last to receive that interior illumination which Nature is always ready to

give to whose hearts have not been hardened by materialism and external trivialities.

It is significant that in the lives of almost all great saints and sages, seers and mystic,

there has been a period of retirement from the world of activity: and in this period

their eyes have been opened to the supersensual world.68

The analogy of the seer or sage here emphasizes the apparently altruistic motivation

underpinning this type of isolationism, reminiscent of Nietzsche’s characterization of

Zarathustra, part of which Delius set in A Mass of Life, a work included in Delius’s self-

funded debut concert in London in 1899. The underlying idea here is that the seer isolates

himself not to indulge loosely in his own imagination, but rather to uncompromisingly pursue

self-improvement. Nietzsche’s ‘Good European’ was also such a figure, alluding to the crucial

link between the notion of cosmopolitanism and the project of human betterment. This link is

similar to what was described earlier in relation to Kant’s notion of the ‘cosmopolitan purpose’

of the exercise of reason, though while Kant’s cosmopolitan community was to emerge


66 From Beecham’s A Mingled Chime: Leaves from an Autobiography, quoted in Philip Heseltine [Peter Warlock], Frederick

Delius (London: Bodley Head, 1923, rev. 1952), 21.


68 Heseltine, Frederick Delius, 37.




naturally via the dialectical processes of history, Nietzsche’s involved a highly individualized

‘praxis’.69

Interestingly, what Heseltine pinpointed in these few comments was the curious paradox

that Delius’s isolationism was in fact a condition of his cosmopolitanism – that his self-

imposed isolation which had led to the critical bewilderment surrounding his music had

been a necessary part of his engaged humanitarian agenda. This perception of Delius was

manifest in commentary not only on his music, but also on his personal manner and physique,

his mode of dress, his non-engagement with the academy, his lack of self-promotion, his

spirituality, and his attitude to nature, emotion, the war, and exercise and sport. In other

words, it was not Delius’s supposedly ‘elusive nationality’ that made him a cosmopolitan,

but rather a deeply ingrained aesthetic sense of how the individual relates to the whole that

conditioned both his work and his manner of living. Central to this aesthetic discourse was

a latent anxiety about detachment in terms of the individual and the state that were to later

play into debates about the idea of Europe.

The Myth of Self-CreationAllied to the interaction between the isolated pursuit of artistic truths (in service of nothing but

themselves) and the purpose of communal progress was a notion of aesthetic independence

that was seemingly antithetical to notions of organic evolution in a national and historical

sense. In addition to isolation and detachment, this idea of self-creation and non-allegiance

to nation, creed, tradition, or history in order to discover a higher overarching beauty was

typical of the aesthetic movement, which is why these concepts have hereto been more fully

explored in relation to literary rather than musical modernism.

Delius was routinely cast as being without musical progenitors. Critics such as Basil

Hogarth, for example, noted that ‘it is a profound error to regard [Delius] as a musical

realist, a Zola of the tone art like Moussorgsky or Strauss. Nor is he an obscure impressionist

like Debussy, with whom he has often been compared by uninstructed commentators’,70

and ‘He owed allegiance to no formal school or caste of musical technique [ . . . ] Even

his earliest compositions bear his characteristic imprints’.71 Hogarth concluded that Delius

‘defied categorisation’. Crucially, Hogarth also observed in Delius’s music what he described

(following Nietzsche) as the ‘pathos of distance’ – an attribute that he also heard in the music

of Brahms and Mahler.72

Christopher Palmer made a similar connection between Delius’s apparent isolation and

detachment, his cosmopolitanism, and his artistic uniqueness, characterizing Delius as

‘fundamentally a lonely person’ and writing that

69 See Martine Prange, ‘Cosmopolitan Roads to Culture and the Festival Road of Humanity: The Cosmopolitan Praxis

of Nietzsche’s Good European Against Kantian Cosmopolitanism’, Ethical Perspectives: Journal of the European Ethics

Network 14/3 (2007): 271.

70 Hogarth, ‘Frederick Delius’, 156.






this essential loneliness is surely reflected in his cosmopolitan isolation. Delius had

no home. His whole life was affected by an uprootedness, a yearning insecurity. Yet it

was this very uprootedness, this isolation, this forced cosmopolitanism, which bred

in him a rich and vital creative personality – and hence the whole man, Frederick

Delius, and his music, which is like no other in the world.73

And of course the inimitable Heseltine had put forward a similar line:

one of the most striking features of Delius’s music – even in the early and more

or less immature works – is the almost complete absence of any other composer’s

influence.74

And further: ‘No less eclectic composer than Delius ever lived. He derived from nowhere,

it would seem [ . . . ] he descends from the distant ages of man’s first struggling efforts.’75

Without compositional parentage, without national ties or external engagement – not even

playing the tambourine – Delius appears as if from nowhere, with a prophetic vision of

musical truth.

The view of Delius as being without progenitors is explicitly contrary to notions of progress,

contrary to Burkean and later Thatcherite notions of Britain being an organic development

of its intellectual heritage, and indeed is controversially ahistorical. It underpins a belief in

genius as being above its time, and plays into the evaluative notion that beauty is not a

fixed standard, but rather it is whatever the sincere operation of genius defines it to be. In

relation to discourses on morality in late Victorian times, this view was often associated with

a corresponding problematization of moral norms, and a generally critical attitude to forms

of social authority.

The ‘Good European’ and Amor fatiThe critical practices associated with cosmopolitanism that have become attributed to Delius

were undoubtedly given an additional weight due to his Nietzschean sympathies. As a result,

his cosmopolitanism was explicitly articulated as conforming to Nietzsche’s idea of the ‘Good

European’. Though the persona of the ‘Good European’ was clearly framed within Nietzsche’s

critique of nationalism in Europe, it embodied far more than a desire for European unification,

or political cosmopolitanism. Rather, ‘Good Europeanism’ involved the persistent critique

of morality and the ‘revaluation of all values’, aligned with Nietzsche’s broader philosophical

project.

For Nietzsche, the rise of modern nationalism in Europe was directly linked with

secularization. In effect, he viewed nationalism as serving a religious function in the wake

73 Palmer, Delius, xi.


75 Heseltine, Frederick Delius, 19.




of the ‘death of God’, and as a response to the ensuing nihilism.76 As a part of his critique

of nationalism, Nietzsche argued that the desire to find a ‘new idol’ in order to avoid the

experience of meaninglessness, incoherence, and contingency – namely, looking to ‘the

nation’ to take up the function of God – was not a latent feature of human nature. Rather,

this ‘incomplete nihilism’, which still evinced the ‘will-to-truth’, was an attitude that could be

traced to a Christian and Platonic existential framework that broadly distinguished between

the world of appearances and an underlying ‘true’ reality that is unchanging and eternal.

In this respect, nationalism represented a continuation of religious values in secular form,

making these values seem natural and grounded in human nature. According to Nietzsche

then, the allure of nationalism is based both on a deeper search for meaning and on an

assumption that this search for meaning is good, or necessary, or natural.

The task of the ‘Good European’ in this respect is to challenge the Christian-Platonic

idea of a ‘true’ reality existing separately from our lived experience, and embrace the

contingent and ambiguous aspects of this life. The ‘Good European’ is someone who not

only transgresses national identification then, but also more broadly critiques the underlying

cultural assumptions on which those identifications are built.

In rejecting the idea that the search for meaning is anything other than culturally

conditioned, the ‘Good European’ accepts nihilism completely. Despite this, the figure is a

‘high spirited’ and ‘world-affirming human being’.77 Nietzsche’s positive embrace of nihilism

involves a studied practice of loving one’s life and fate:

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then

I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love

henceforth! I do not wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not

even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And

all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.78

Coming to love one’s fate, for Nietzsche, involved joyously accepting that there is only one

version of the world, and of your life, and so also accepting the doctrine of an unchanging

eternal recurrence of that world and life. This acceptance does not imply a passive fatalism,

nor is it necessarily an argument against political action, because one can work to transform

one’s life and society while still comprehending the inevitability of human struggle and

exploitation.79

Amor fati and its link with the project of Good Europeanism as a holistic critical practice is

crucial for understanding the interaction between Delius’s public reception as a cosmopolitan

76 See Stefan Elbe, ‘“Labyrinths of the Future”: Nietzsche’s Genealogy of European Nationalism’, Journal of Political

Ideologies 7/1 (2002).

77 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966), 56.

78 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann

(New York: Random House, 1974) 223 (original emphasis).

79 For more on amor fati, see Leslie Paul Thiele, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic

Individualism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) and Garry M. Brodsky, ‘Nietzsche’s notion of amor fati’,

Continental Philosophy Review 31 (1998).




and ‘Good European’ in a historical sense, and his personal ethics. In an infamous letter to

Delius’s biographer Richard Muller, Percy Grainger described Delius as a ‘sex-worshipper’

who ‘practiced immorality with puritanical stubbornness’, and noted that ‘Delius was never

lewd about sex, to my knowledge. He never joked about it in my hearing. He worshipped sex,

practiced it as part of a cultured and yea-some life (“I am a be-jaende Natur” [sic] he was

always saying).’80 Similarly, in a letter from Delius to Philip Heseltine in 1912:

I want to tell you that Jesus – Nietzsche & Co are really the same natures – Earnest,

ardent & sincere natures protesting against human fraud & humbug: & destroyers

of doctrine – Neither of them had any system; both were destroyers – These sort

of intense natures seem to appear periodically – & in all parts of the world – Jesus,

coming at the time of the great Roman decadence – preached naturally the negation

of life – Nietzsche, coming at the end of the Roman Catholic & Protestant church

systems based on the negation of life – preached Optimism & affirmation of Life –

When this has had a good innings something else will crop up – I do not find it

depressing at all to look upon death as complete annihilation. It harmonises perfectly

with my outlook on Life & I am an optimist & I love life in all its forms.81

Here we see Delius making an association between cosmopolitanism (as embodied in

Nietzsche’s ‘Good European’) with an ability to question or critique social and aesthetic

norms, suggesting a broad congruence with cognitive practices associated with modernism

generally, including the withdrawal from social consensus.82

This link between cognitive practice, ethos and a particular aesthetic outcome (in this case

musical) lies behind much of the reception of Delius’s music, and indeed has at times been

explicitly articulated:

In one way in particular is Delius’s cosmopolitanism symptomatic of his entire

disposition. He was a rebel as a young man and his rebellious nature kept him young.

He detested and hit out against those pretentious fooleries which the majority of

us are bamboozled and brainwashed into accepting as the realities of existence; he

flouted convention not for the sake of flouting convention but because he weighed

conformity in the balance of his own experience and found it wanting. So too in

music. He was never lulled by the fashionable complacency endemic in certain species

of artists, nor by the security and acceptability of long-tried, oft-used conventions of

syntax. He asked questions all the time and judged the answers by what experience

had taught him, not by what had been instilled into him from birth. He held the

musical Establishment and academic respectability in music in the highest contempt;

he adapted the techniques of musical composition to his own ends. Knowing precisely

what he was doing [ . . . ] He made no parade of technical knowledge, but he knew,

80 Percy Grainger, letter to Richard Muller, 5 October 1941, AUS-PVgm, 02.0109, X93–2.

81 Frederick Delius, letter to Philip Heseltine, 27 July 1912, quoted in Smith, Frederick Delius and Peter Warlock, 43.

82 For more on the link between modernism and the cosmopolitan attitude of ‘decadent refusal’ see Walkowitz,

Cosmopolitan Style.




and it no doubt amused him to hear people with no inside experience of his scores

describe him as a dilettante and an ‘amateur’, but in fact he was one of the most

‘professional’ musicians who ever lived, and certainly one of the most musical.83

Palmer here construes Delius in opposing terms that echoed the association of his work

and persona with the cosmopolitan practices of Nietzsche’s ‘Good European’. Like the

‘Good European’, Delius was seen to have adopted an attitude of distance from the

normative assumptions that conditioned his historical moment. This distance allowed him to

disassociate himself from national allegiance and, with this, reject his received cultural heritage

and the assumption of the possibility of transcendence that underpinned this heritage. In

tandem with this attitude of distance, however, was Delius’s wholesale embrace of life and

fate – an attitude that only intensified with his terminal diagnosis, and the onset of blindness

and paralysis towards the end of his life.

Emotion and Intellect: English after allThe mandate of the ‘Good European’ to be detached and yet passionate was borne out in the

perceived discrepancy between Delius’s personal character and his music. The expression

of this dichotomy reveals the ambivalence towards the twin forces of detachment and

engagement in early twentieth-century conceptions of cosmopolitanism in Britain, and post-

war conceptions of musical modernism in Anglo-American musicology more generally.

Reviews of Delius’s London concert in 1899 lighted upon what they perceived as a

prominent emotional aspect to his music. John F. Runciman, for example, described the

concert first as ‘all was Beauty and emotion’,84 and then upon reflection a week later in the

following terms: ‘Mr Delius always wishes to express some emotion, or give us a distinctive

poetic atmosphere.’85 Quoting a letter from Delius, C. W. Orr noted the composer’s view of

music as ‘a way of expressing one’s feelings; and one ought to follow one’s own inclinations

entirely, otherwise one will never attain to any intensity of expression or emotion – the

two essential things in music’.86 Affirming this sentiment, Orr added that ‘in music, which

ought to be the expression of emotion, only that which is based on emotion is capable of

development, and nothing based on technique or on anything objective will develop into

anything but mere intellectuality’.87 Thus establishing his evaluative criteria, Orr casts Delius

as a romantic temperament, a lover of nature, a colourist; as emphasizing harmony over

counterpoint; as having a focus on emotion; as being heroic despite his frail and failing

body. This type of reading projects an image of Delius’s music as internal, emotional, full

of feeling – characteristics that mark him as being detached from worldly concerns; as a

83 Palmer, Delius, x (original emphasis).

84 JFR, ‘Music in Excess’, Saturday Review, 3 June 1899, 684.

85 JFR, ‘From Delius to Dolmetsch’, Saturday Review, 10 June 1899, 717.

86 C. W. Orr, ‘Frederick Delius: Some Personal Recollections’, in A Delius Companion, ed. Christopher Redwood (New

York: Da Capo Press, 1977), 61. Orr’s essay was first published in Musical Opinion, August 1934, with additions from

Making Music, summer 1955.

87 Orr, ‘Frederick Delius’, 61.




child of intuition; and that emphasize his auto-didactic, amateur or self-created qualities.

Delius’s period in Paris during the 1890s and his acquaintance with prominent artists of post-

impressionism and Symbolism during this time served to support this aesthetic image of the

man. Also from this period was his well-known association with occult and astrological circles

in Paris, including his collaboration with Papus (whom he met in 1893), and with whom he

wrote an essay casting the orchestra in physiological terms with reference to ‘Cabala’.88

The aesthetic characterization that these associations invited, however, was explicitly

challenged by appeals to an opposing facet of Delius’s persona, and it is via this crucial

point of opposition that we may again discern the paradoxical implications of Delius’s

cosmopolitanism:

[Delius’s] partiality for refined nostalgic effects has led many to regard Delius as

Huysmans regarded Edgar Allan Poe, a painter of the October of the passions. But

such a description is misleading – it is but one side of his genius. Side by side there

existed an ecstatic frenzy, an exuberant joie de vivre very different from the mournful,

lachrymose self-pity of the Boston poet. To those who only know their Delius by

hearsay his robust vigour will come as a tonic. A life-long disciple of Nietzsche and

Browning, he flung open the shutters of his mind and, rejoicing in nature’s bounty,

took his fill of joy to overflowing.89

In his introduction to the second edition of Heseltine’s biography of Delius, Hubert Foss

noted that ‘the man Delius was totally unlike his music, the one displaying a most purposeful

character, the other the vivid nebulosity of dreams’.90 Foss also quoted Cecil Gray as agreeing

with this point when he described Delius the person – as opposed to his music – as a ‘violent,

bigoted, doctrinaire atheist’.91 Runciman made a similar point in 1903:

He is about forty years of age, taller than one at first thinks, lean, wiry, strenuous in

every movement, a fine face with piercing eyes, hair a little thinner than it was and

turning from brown to grey. Every movement he makes is rapid, decisive.92

The decisiveness Runciman attributed to Delius’s physical presence extended to his impression

of the opposing characteristics embodied in Delius’s music, and to his evaluation of Delius’s

musical sincerity (a point which was implicitly at issue in Delius’s reception as a cosmopolitan

composer):

88 The essay was titled ‘Anatomie et Physiologie de l’Orchestre’. For more on Delius’s period in Paris, see Lionel Carley,

Frederick Delius: the Paris Years (Rickmansworth: Triad, 1975).

89 Hogarth, ‘Frederick Delius’, 159–60.

90 Hubert Foss, ‘Introduction’, in Heseltine, Frederick Delius, 15.

91 Quoted in Foss, ‘Introduction’, 22.

92 John F. Runciman, ‘Fritz Delius, Composer’, in A Delius Companion, 14. Runciman’s essay was first published in the

Musical Courier, 18 March 1903.




That there was intention, real mastery of notes; that every sound proceeding from

the orchestra was meant by the composer; that there was no bungling, not from

beginning to end an unanticipated effect – all this every competent critic knew.93

Runciman further observed that ‘there is no ugliness, no anarchy, nothing but order – logical

order, to the point of severity – and beauty and expressiveness’.

Delius appears through these accounts as simultaneously expressive yet severe, dream-like

yet purposeful, nebulous yet decisive – dualisms that were apparently articulated through his

physique, compositional output, and persona ethos. Even more extraordinarily, this tendency

to conflate bodily, musical, and ethical dispositions extended also to the question of national

affiliation, with which we began our discussion of cosmopolitanism above:

In his person Mr. Delius has few of what are known as the characteristics of a

musician, and his appearance least of all suggests him as the composer of such

rhapsodic flights of fancy and emotion as are many of his works. His close-cropped

hair, his firm business-like expression on a somewhat strongly outlined face, his

freedom from any obvious emotion, and his capacity for speaking on any subject

but the one that is paramount in his thoughts, disarms suspicion to the stranger of

what his profession is. In this avoidance of any characteristically artistic appearance

or manner he is perhaps more distinctively English than in any other respect. Yet

though it is hidden, the artistic instinct burns more brightly within him than it does

in many a long-haired aesthete; and while he is a professional among professionals,

he is an amateur because he loves his art.94

In 1934 Basil Hogarth made a similar point:

Those who were privileged to know him intimately in Edwardian days never failed

to mark the dominant features of the English temper: the firm and business-like

conduct of daily affairs, his horror of exaggeration both in art and life, his outspoken

views, his disgust with public emotions.95

Delius is cast here as being balanced between intellect and intuition, robustness and fancy,

professional and amateur, artistic yet business-like, disengaged yet engaged. His robustness

and sincerity and lack of exaggeration – or, his restricted emotionalism – was in fact the

very thing that marked him as being resolutely English, so that indeed his status as a ‘Good

European’ in respect of his balancing of the rational and the emotional was the very thing

that rooted him to an English characterization.

In the context of early twentieth-century Britain, Delius’s cosmopolitanism presented an

unnerving alternative to nationalist interests that appealed to the rhetoric of authenticity

and organicism, because Delius’s apparent lack of affiliation could not easily be dismissed in

terms of the opposing rhetoric of artificiality and foreignness. To be sure, his reception as a

93 Runciman, ‘Fritz Delius, Composer’, 15.

94 ‘Frederick Delius, The Musical Herald 1 (1919), 360–1.





cosmopolitan reflected the enduring malleability and complexity of the concept in the sense

that it could serve as an indicator of opposing natures. It also suggests how cosmopolitanism

functioned as an outlook, and so came to apply across different facets of life and work

(or ‘process’ and ‘application’). The term was, and remains today, unstable and ‘double-

edged’, just as the prevailing ambivalence towards practices of autonomy across aesthetic

and non-aesthetic realms during Delius’s lifetime is still apparent in contemporary debates

about musical modernism and the idea of Europe, respectively. More crucially perhaps, the

intellectual manoeuvre that allowed Delius’s cosmopolitanism to become not only decisive

evidence of but also a necessary condition to his national allegiance suggests the potential

of cosmopolitanism to serve as an anti-polarizing outlook. The historical manifestation of

this kind of outlook gives an empirical basis from which to view the dialectical interplay

of autonomy and commitment in modernity, and in this sense can support the revision of

current constructions of musical modernism.

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