Delius really did compose superb film music 30 years before Talkies

Yesterday provided England with one of those evenings which seem to demand a Delius soundtrack. After an oppressively hot day, twilight is just starting to fall, everyone’s back from the office, neighbours have called their children in for dinner, all is still… and then a faint breeze stirs, bringing with it the scent of garden flowers through an open sitting-room window – that’s the Delius moment. Cue those sensuous rhapsodies In a Summer Garden, A Song of Summer or Summer Night on the River.

Finding myself alone for the evening, I revved up Sky Planner and watched a recent 90-minute BBC 4 programme, Delius: Composer, Lover, Enigma, which is available on iPlayer, here, until June 4th. I’d put off watching it for a bit because I assumed from its title that it would linger lovingly and smuttily on the composer’s voracious sexual appetite and the effects of the syphilis which resulted from it (blindness, paralysis etc.). And, yes, there was quite a lot of that (he did put it about quite a bit, especially racketing around Paris with the likes of Gaugin) – but mainly the programme concentrated on his music, and did it quite brilliantly. I’ve been listening to lots of Delius today, and it’s as if I’d had my ears syringed.

BBC 4 has found the knack of interviewing professional music folk who can explain why they love a piece of music rather than simply telling us that they do so. And they don’t even need words – there’s a potentially cringe-making sequence where the conductor Andrew Davies keeps getting distracted while trying to describe what’s going on in The Song of the High Hills, but his obviously genuine rapture is moving. (The inspiration fror the piece was the mountains of Norway - Delius holidayed there most years.)

Delius is distinctly Marmitey – listeners tend to hate his music or adore it. I’ve been in the latter camp ever since hearing “On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring” some 40 years ago. A young German chap visited my college digs one day (can't remember why). He had blue eyes, floppy blond hair, and was dressed in a traditional hounds-tooth sports jacket, cavalry twills and  a cravat – ever so Brideshead. He was called Delius, and, yes, he was distantly related to the  composer, although probably not through the illegitimate child the tunesmith sired during an affair with a black girl in America. My interest having been piqued, I bought a Delius greatest hits compilation and was smitten (by the record, not the bloke - I wasn't at all Brideshead): I didn’t have a clue what Delius was doing, musically, but I responded instantly to his plush, gorgeous soundscape.

Many are put off by the music’s lack of development, and it’s true that most of Delius’s most famous pieces don’t seem to actually go anywhere: they just are. Fortunately, I’m too musically ignorant to discern the lack of direction or structure, so I don’t really care. All I know is that the music is ravishingly, stunningly, overwhelmingly, immersively beautiful. In the right circumstances, it washes through one's central nervous system like a drug. As David Own Norris points out in the BBC 4 programme, there’s something distinctly cinematic about Delius - he was in effect writing movie soundtracks 30 years before there was any need for them: that may be why he can be so immediately accessible.

Delius was a great original. He was the first western composer to use a “blue” note in a classical music setting (the third section of his Florida Suite), the first to write a “black” opera (Koanga), and, as I discovered from the programme, the first composer to try to capture the sense of being alone in a teeming city (Paris: The Song of a Great City).

I’ve tried to write about Delius several times before, but the effect his music has on me is so visceral, it’s proved hard to describe coherently. So I’ll just point anyone who’s even vaguely interested to the programme (or to David Mitchell's brilliant novel, Cloud Atlas, which contains a thinly-veiled portrait of the amoral old reprobate in his declining years - not a nice man, Delius, even before the syphilis took hold).

If you’ve only ever heard Delius’s more celebrated pieces – for instance, On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, Brigg Fair or Walk to the Paradise Garden – and haven’t been impressed, I really recommend giving Florida Suite a try: it has a lot more shape and vigour than much of his later stuff, and his interpretation of black spirituals and work-songs (heard while he was supposed to be growing oranges there) is fascinating. Sleigh Ride is relatively brief, and unexpectedly jolly. Appalachia is another favourite of mine, and his Violin Concerto is achingly lovely throughout.

I enjoyed the story of how Sir Thomas Beecham - the composer's greatest champion - had Delius's remains shipped over from France pronto so they could be buried in a Surrey graveyard - at night! Beecham was determined that Delius would be forever considered an English composer. The plan seems to have worked a treat.