The Brass Cuckoo
A programme devised and compiled by Carole Rosen from the correspondence between Frederick Delius and Philip Heseltine.
It was in 1911 that Heseltine, a 16-year-old schoolboy, heard the first performance of the Songs of Sunset by Delius at a concert in the Queen's Hall. The work made such a profound impression on him that he wrote to the composer - and so began an extraordinary friendship that was to last until the younger man's tragic death 19 years later. The rich variety and the importance of that relationship to both men is vividly reflected in the letters they wrote to each other.

Frederick Delius........Jack May
Philip Heseltine..........Michael Cochrane

Heseltine

"Eton College, June the 17th, 1911
Dear Mr. Delius,
I feel I must write and tell you how very much I enjoyed your concert last night, though I cannot adequately express in words what intense pleasure it was for me to hear such perfect performances of such perfect music. I hope you will not mind my writing to you like this, but I write in all sincerity, and your works appeal to me so strongly, so much more than any other music I have ever heard, that I feel I cannot but tell you what joy they afford me, not only in the hearing of them, and in studying of vocal scores at the piano (which until last night was my only means of getting to know your music), but also in the impression they leave, for I am sure that to hear and to be moved by beautiful music is to be influenced for good - far more than any number of sermons and discourses can influence!
It was extremely kind of you to see me in the interval, especially as you had so many friends to talk to. I am most grateful to you for allowing me to make your acquaintance, and I shall value it very highly. If you would be so kind as to do me the honour of a visit in Mr Beecham's motor, as you suggested, I should be overjoyed to see you and Mr Beecham any Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday afternoon this or next month, and I will show you everything you may wish to see in Eton and Windsor.
Believe me, your very sincere admirer, Philip Heseltine."

Delius

"Grez-sur-Loing
Dear Mr Heseltine,
Thank you so much for your warm and sympathetic letters which gave me the greatest pleasure. Send me the pieces you have orchestrated, and I'll be very glad to help you. You have a great talent for orchestration - that I could see from the two pieces you showed me.
I think it is absurd that your teacher only gives you finger exercises! I would simply tell him you did not come to Köln for that purpose. If I were you, I would go to the best theorist in Köln and learn what you can from him. As a writer and critic it may be of some use to you, as a composer - none whatever!
It is of no importance whether you write at the piano or not - as long as you feel you want to express some emotion. Music is nothing else! I do not believe in any music constructed knowingly on any harmonic scheme whatsoever. All the people who write about the harmonic system, or try to invent other systems (quarter-tones etc), don't seem to have to have anything to say on music. Systems are put together from the compositions of inspired musicians! Harmony is only a means of expression which is gradually developing. I don't believe in learning harmony or counterpoint."

Heseltine

"Köln, December the 10th, 1911
Dear Mr Delius,
I was highly delighted with what you said about my piano teacher. I am sure it is useless for anyone who is not going to study seriously for three years at least, to learn from the foundations any of these complicated methods, good as they may be for professional pianists. I have ... (break in reception, approx 10 seconds) ... of ... I'd like better. But how am I to do it? If I had ideas, I could not write them down without a piano, and it is such an unsatisfactory feeling that one must seek ideas at the piano. If I am to make music my profession, which is of course my great wish, I do not see what I can do except become a critic - a writer on but not of music."

Delius

"Grez-sur-Loing, February the 24th, 1912
Dear Heseltine,
Forgive me for keeping you waiting so long - I have been very busy with a new work.
The arrangement for two pianos of my Summer Garden I think is excellently done, and I hope you will play it for me on my way through Köln. I shall be in Germany in a fortnight - first Berlin, and on my way back I hope to see you in Köln.
Your songs are beautiful. In one or two I have made slight alterations - only a suggestion, mind - you come so persistently back to E flat in one of them.
Excuse this hasty scribble. With kindest regards."

Heseltine

"Köln, February the 28th, 1912
Alas I shall not be in Germany in a fortnight's time, in fact I shall not be here next week. Since my love of music is so unpractical, I must take the next best work that comes along, and this being the English Civil Service I shall have to sacrifice a good deal of what I should like to do to what is necessary.
I discovered last month that to comply with the age limit regulations, I shall have to enter for my first Oxford exam very much earlier than I had previously supposed. On that account therefore, most unwillingly, I must return to England and recommence study of the Classics at the beginning of next month. For the English Civil Service exam (for which I enter in five years time), Classics and English are of necessity my chief subjects - German only counting one tenth part of the total marks.
I am extremely sorry to miss seeing you here, as I had long been looking forward to your visit to Germany, but I continue to hope most ardently that you will come over and see us in Wales next August or September. I long to roam the wild hills with you - who understand them, who are in sympathy with them, and to whom they are not merely sights pleasing to the eye."

Delius

"Grez-sur-Loing, March the 11th, 1912
Thanks for your nice letter. Do not be afraid to write to me when you feel like it. I love to receive your letters and assure you that they are never a bore to me. If you do not always have a quick and lengthy reply, please do not attribute it to lack of interest - it will be because I am occupied with something very absorbing. If ever you want some advice from someone who really likes you, and feels real interest in your welfare, you can come to me without the slightest restraint. On any subject or question whatsoever, I will tell you what I really think - and I can assure you that very few people ever tell one what they really think! When they do, they are always invaluable."

Delius

"Grez-sur-Loing, June the 23rd, 1912
Forgive me, dear Heseltine, for leaving your interesting letters unanswered. I am working hard on a new choral and orchesrtral work, and am already advanced.
I consider Nietzsche the only free thinker of modern times, and for me the most sympathetic one. He is at the same time such a poet - he feels Nature. I believe, myself, in no doctrine whatever, and in nothing but in Nature, and the great forces of Nature. I believe in complete annihilation as far as our personal consciousness goes. Matter, of course, in in an eternal state of change and evolution. In the great scheme of Nature, Man is no more important than a fly...

Musical excerpt - "O Du mein Wille" from A Mass of Life

...Nietzsche does not want to reduce the lower order of Mankind to slavery - they are in slavery and will remain in slavery in spite of all theory to the contrary! The whole history of the world is the history of a few individuals"

Heseltine

"Cefn Brynteg(??), January the 8th, 1913
I don't know what you will think of me plaguing you with so many letters full of trivialities when you are busy with the greatest matters in the world, but you have been so good to me that I think perhaps you will forgive me if I ask your advice before taking - or not taking - a step which will be of the greatest importance to me, for there is no-one to whom I feel I can turn at the present moment sooner than to you.
I simply cannot go on with my present humdrum slavery to Greek and Latin for the next five years, for the sake of a possible post in the Civil Service, where I could vegetate complacently for the rest of my life on a large salary - and pension thrown in. There is only one thing I have a burning enthusiasm for, only one thing I feel I could work for come what may of adverse conditions - and that is, vaguely, music. I say vaguely because I have absolutely no confidence in myself, or that I have the smallest ability to do anything in any specific branch of music. Ah the same time, if I could but obtain the meanest position in the world of music, I would sooner die like a dog there, if need be, than attain to a comfortable and conventional position in the Civil Service or on the Stock Exchange.
When I was with you in Grez, nearly a year-and-a-half ago, you advised me to abandon all other pursuits and to devote myself to music. I was a fool not to do so at once I suppose, but, at that time, my ideas of what I was going to do were so utterly confused that I had not the courage to take any decisive step. Do you still advise me to do so? At the present moment, what I really have my eyes upon is - do not laugh at me too much - musical criticism. With five years general study of music I think I could do as well as some of the men whose columns one reads in the press."

Delius

"Grez-sur-Loing, January the 11th, 1913
You ask me for advice in choosing between the Civil Service in which you have no interest whatever, and music which you love. I will give it to you. I think that the most stupid thing one can do is spend one's life doing something one hates, or in which one has no interest - in other words it is a wasted life. I do not beleive in sacrificing the big things of life to anyone or anything. The greatest pleasure and satisfaction I have experienced in life has been through music - in making it, and in hearing it, and in living with it. I shall advise you to study music, so as you'll be able to give lessons in harmony, counterpoint and orchestration.
You can always become a critic. I think that you are sufficiently gifted to become a composer. Everything depends on your perseverence. One never knows how far one can go. Trust more in hard work than in inspiration.
Should you decide for the musical profession, I would suggest Berlin first and London after, so that when once you go to London it may be for good and perhaps to get a position on some paper or weekly or monthly. You write marvellously well, which cannot be said for many of the English critics..."

Musical excerpt - On Hearing the first Cuckoo in Spring - over which...

Heseltine

"Christchurch, Oxford, February the 11th, 1914
Dear Mr Delius,
Let me try and tell you as best I can what a perfect joy it was to me to hear your Two Pieces for small orchestra at Queen's Hall on January the 20th. The first piece is the most exquisite, entirely lovely piece of music I have heard for many a long day. It almost makes one cry for the sheer beauty of it. I play it often on the piano, and it is constantly in my head - a kind of beautiful undercurrent to my thoughts. For me, the deep, quiet sense of glowing happiness and the mysterious feeling of being at the very heart of Nature that pervades the piece is too lovely for words."

Delius

"Grez-sur-Loing, March the 11th, 1914
Dear Mr Heseltine,
I only returned here last night. We have been away in Germany just one month. Heard the Mass of Life at Wiesbaden and Frankfurt, and Songs of Sunset in Elberfeldt(?). It gave me the greatest possible pleasure to hear you like the Two Pieces so much. On my return here I found the whole material of Fennimore awaiting me. Won't you come here and correct it for me, or help me? When do your holidays begin?!
I heard Schoenberg's Kammersymphonie in Köln. It is very dry and unpoetical, and entirely intellectual - hmmm, but did not sound bad at all. At times like Strauss in Heldenleben, and sometimes - hmmm, quite interesting! I agree with every effort of the young school to do something new, but I disagree with music becoming a merely mathematical and intellectual art."

Heseltine

"Ivanhoe Hotel, Bloomsbury Street, March the 24th, 1914
I am burning to find some means of escape from the appalling, ennovating (?) and depressing atmosphere of Oxford. The place is just one foul pool of stagnation. I simply cannot stand it, and I am getting nowhere, and it is fearful to wander on through life aimless, objectless, and, what is worse, moneyless. I met Ernest Newman the other day and sought to discover what it was necessary to do to become a critic. He considers the ordinary, academic musical training of small use, and he strongly advises taking up some other profession to keep the pot boiling 'til one is ready and able to stand on one's feet in the musical world. But as for other professions this accursed public school and univerity education fits one for nothing. At the age of 19 the product of Eton and Oxford is worth a thousand times less than the product of the National Board schools - what in the Devil's name is to be done!?"

Delius

"Grez-sur-Loing, March the 25th, 1914
My dear Philip,
I hasten to write you a few words in reply to your letter just arrived. Firstly, if you can manage to come here for a week or ten days I should be delighted to pay your expenses, and besides correcting the material we might talk things over properly together and take nice walks in so doing.
You seem to be in a pretty unsettled state of mind. The career of a critic is no career at all. Why don't you try your uncle's office to see how you like it - for breathing space - and continue writing your articles at the same time?"

Heseltine

"54 Cartwright Gardens, London WC, October the 18th, 1914
I have left Oxford for ever! I have decided not to concentrate entirely on music for the present. At the present time I feel very keenly the need for a somewhat wider education as a kind of mental foundation. I have accordingly entered the University of London as a student of the English Language and Literature, with Philosophy and Psychology as subsiduary subjects for three years. In a few weeks I hope to begin lessons in composition, etc, with Gustav von Holst, whom Balfour Gardiner recommends as the best man in London for this purpose. Apparently the Royal College and the Royal Academy of Music are so effete and antiquated that it is merely a waste of time to study there.
I am living in a jolly part of London, in a quite secluded square in Bloomsbury, near St Pancras station. The neighbourhood is thoroughly alive - which is essential for my liking - and unrespectable! At night the streets swarm with whores and hot-potato men and other curious and interesting phenomena, and the darkness, which the fear of hostile aircraft has enforced upon the city, makes eveything doubly mysterious, fascinating and enchanting.
Music is of course at a low ebb, and I fear it will suffer greatly during the next few years, though there will be some consolation for the flood of patriotic filth that will be poured forth in the fact that those composers who resist the force of the mob's passion will stand out in their greater relief and pre-eminence.
I have been to various Promenade concerts, but as a whole the programmes have been worse than usual and the audiences, as a result, proportionately larger! Your two little pieces were mangled in the most execrable way. The strings played just anyhow, and the cuckoo came in at the wrong moment nearly every time.
I have just read the novels of D.H.Lawrence - three in number. They are to my mind simply unrivalled in depth of insight and beauty of language by any other comtemporary writer. Shall I send you one?"

Delius

"Grove Mill House, Watford, December the 8th, 1914
I have spoken with Beecham about you, and he will in future give you all his programme work to do. I shall also insist with the Philharmonic that you do the analytical notes of my North Country Sketches to be given in January. We will talk about this when we meet.
You must insist that all your articles are printed in extenso or not at all!
We had a fine concert in Manchester, and Beecham gave an address last Friday evening to the Royal College of Music there. It was a bombshell! He told them all these Colleges of Music were useless and frauds, and three-quarters of the personnel incompetent!"

Heseltine

"The Daily Mail, February the 19th, 1915
The feature of the London Symphony Orchestra's concert in the Queen's Hall last night was the performance of Frederick Delius' Piano Concerto. The neglect of this magnificent work is inexplicable in view of the tremendous applause with which it is always greeted. One performance a year is not enough, and yesterday's revival of the work was due solely to Mr Thomas Beecham, not to any of our British pianists who are too busy with old concertos we have heard over and over again to attend to the work of their compatriot. They will continue to be so until the public wakes to the fact that in Frederick Delius they have the greatest composer England has produced for two centuries."

Heseltine

"April, 1915
The business of musical criticism for a London Daily is really a farce. Would you recommend me to continue doing this? It is quite evident that the cause of music cannot be in the least degree benefited by anyone who writes in such a paper. The people who control it and edit it dare not take the risk of offending anybody, not even dead composers!"

Delius

"Watford, April the 8th, 1915
Hold on yet a while with the Daily Mail. I told Lady Cunard (?) about your position there, and she wrote a long letter to Lord Northcliffe telling him to give you a free hand, otherwise it was no good whatever having a musician there as a critic. Probably that'll help. Write just as you feel, and don't take the slightest notice of their blue pencil. Always back your own opinion - take no notice whatever of other peoples'. If you do, the hedgings and concessions begin, and then you sink into the usual critic tone.
I shall be in London on the 12th for a few days, and we must go about the docks a bit together now that the weather is good. Come out here as soon as you can. We can put you up also.
I am writing a concerto for violin, cello and orchestra. Huh! Heaven only knows what it'll turn in to!"

Heseltine

"The Bungalow, Crickley Hill, Gloucestershire, August the 22nd, 1915
Looking back I believe I have not written to you at all since that June Sunday at Watford when Beecham turned up unexpectedly. My plans are very vague. It took three long letters separated by intervals of a fortnight to extract from the elusive Thomas any information about the future of The Sackbutt, the monthly music journal he wants me to edit, and incidentally my quarterly allowance ...
I dislike intensely taking money for nothing done but, under the present agreement, I am neither completely free to do my own work nor am I given anything to occupy myself with outside my own studies. The Sackbutt is shelved from month to month and I am given fearful operatic librettos to translate and requested to coach singers for operatic performance at the Shaftesbury Theatre, neither of which tasks am I competent to perform - and in order to do this I have to remain in London, the one place of all others where the war fever rages most violently, and where its effects oppress and depress one the most."

Heseltine

"12a Rosetti Garden Mansions, Chelsea SW, November the 16th, 1915
This evening I met and had a long talk with D.H.Lawrence. He can stand this country no longer, and is going to America in a week's time. He wants to go to Florida for the winter, since he is, I am afraid, rather far gone with Consumption.
I write this hurried note to ask whether it would be possible for him to go and live in your orange grove? He is such a marvellous man, perhaps the one great literary genius of his generation - at any rate in England."

Delius

"Grez-sur-Loing, November the 24th, 1915
California is a far better climate than Florida. My orange grove has been left to itself for twenty years, and is no doubt only a wilderness of gigantic weeds and plants. The house itself will also have tumbled down. I should have loved to be of use to Lawrence whose work I admire, but to let him go to Florida would be sending him to disaster!"

Heseltine

"13 Rosetti Mansions, December the 15th, 1915
I feel that I am, and have been for years past, rolling downhill with increasing rapidity into a black shiny cesspool of stagnation. I have never lived at all, and that is why I am going away. To Florida, Tahiti, anywhere - to have at least a year or two of real life, to try and make something out of it.
The scheme originated with the writer I mentioned in my last letter, who is keen that a small group of enthusiasts should detach themselves from harassing surroundings and endeavour,for a while, to till the soil of their natures in a congenial atmosphere. This all sounds utterly wild, an irresponsible adventure unthinkable to the cautious, but, good God, one must plunge - even if one never comes up again!
I am in a state of flux. My mind is a whirlpool of alternating excitement and depression."

Delius

"Grez-sur-Loing, January the 22nd, 1916
Your song The Curlew is lovely, and gave me the greatest pleasure. Turn to music, dear boy. That is where you will find the only real satisfaction. Work hard at composition. There is real emotion in your song - the most essential quality for a composer.
How are your other plans developing? I cannot understand Lawrence wanting to give up writing. What on earth for - surely not for planting potatoes or tobacco? Just fancy neglecting the gifts one has, those most precious and rare and mysterious things coming from one knows not where or why! My most earnest advice to you is to turn to musical composition at once, and for good. Voila!"

Heseltine

"2 Annhulse (?) Studios, Battersea SW, October the 11th , 1916
Another long silence - forgive my negligence. This time I have great news for you, so I will confine myself to the one important topic.
I have found an enthusiast whose tastes and aims in music are almost identical to my own, and he has money. So, we are going to set about the regeneration of music in this benighted country in real earnest. Quite definitely, next March, we shall take a small theatre and give a four-week season of opera and concerts, with a definite artistic policy and no compromise with the mob!
Preparations are already being made, and I have an important proposition to lay before you, concerning the Village Romeo and Juliet, which I have always longed to see staged in a manner that shall allow the full significance of the work to be clearly perceived and not buried beneath a mass of stage properties and theatrical misconceptions.
I propose to have no scenery, ie. no set pieces, only plain curtains - possibly a suggestive backcloth or two, nothing more. Costumes of extreme simplicity. The interest must be centered entirely in the play and the music."

Musical excerpt - 'The Walk to the Paradise Garden' from A Village Romeo and Juliet

Delius

"Grez-sur-loing, November the 6th, 1916
I want to lay before you, very precisely, my point of view with regard to artistic and particularly operatic enterprises in England. I am so fond of you, and admire your whole attitude so much, that I wish you thoroughly to understand my attitude.
I know of no artistic, musical, dramatical undertaking that has ever come off in England. The attempt to mount A Village Romeo and Juliet with English singers, chorus and stage manager was a miserable failure - inefficiency and inexperience bursting from every crack. The only good point was the splendid English orchestra and Beecham's conducting. Every gesture of the actors in my work must be controlled and ordered by the conductor, for my music is conceived in that spirit.
Oh, don't you see, dear Phil, that you're all going towards disaster with the best intentions possible and that is what seems to be so hopeless in our country? There have been too many such failures in England, and already the public only really believes in what comes from abroad."

Heseltine

"Trw-y-Dan (?), New Mill, Penzance, Cornwall, May the 13th, 1917
This horrid silence of mine must have seemed very strange to you all these months. Forgive me. The fact is, unpleasant though it be to have to admit it, at the beginning of March I found myself on the verge of utter collapse - physically and mentally.
The collapse of the opera season throught the withdrawal of the promised funds owing to war economy was a bitter disappointmemt.
You were quite right, though I hardly appreciated the truth of your words at the time, when you wrote last winter that we were as yet unripe for a big enterprise. Really when I consider what myself and my opinions have been during the last four years I am quite overcome with shame and confusion. You have been so good and so tolerant, and all the while so right."

Excerpt from Heseltine's arrangement for brass band of On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, over which ...

Narrator

"By the time he'd made that version for brass band of On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, the sensitive, tormented Philip Heseltine had given way to his alter-ego of Peter Warlock, enjoying success as composer between manic bouts of beer-swilling and racing motorcycles.
A year later, Heseltine, Warlock, was dead."