The Song of the High Hills

Das Lied von den hohen Bergen

DCW 73
RT II/6
DCE 11b

Composer: Frederick Delius

The Song of the High Hills is notable for its use of a wordless chorus, in contrast to Delius's careful selection of favoured texts for other large-scale works for voices and orchestra. As Threlfall notes, he wrote in a letter of 1920: 'I have tried to express the joy and exhilaration one feels in the Mountains & also the loneliness & melancholy of the high Solitudes & the grandeur of the wide far distances. The human voices represent man in Nature: an episode, which becomes fainter & then disappears altogether' (RT.1986, 39).

Composition: 1911.

Instrumentation:

Orchestra : 2 fl., picc.fl., 2 ob., cor.ingl., 3 cl., cl.b., 3 fg., sarr. (or cfg.), 6 cor., 3 tr. in C, 3 trb., tb., timp., gr.c., cym., glsp., cel., 2 arp., str.

Wordless Choir SATB: S., A., T., B.

Musical incipit for this work

Sources

Sketch material

[Classification: notated music, manuscript, autograph, sketch]

Contained in a notebook carried by Delius on holidays from 1887 until the turn of the century are 'fragments which can be regarded as germ material for The Song of the High Hills' (RL, 133).

GB-Lbl (British Library, London) MS Mus. 1745/1/38. Link to external resource

British Library source record

Sketch material

[Classification: notated music, manuscript, autograph, sketch]

Miscellaneous sketches for the work, including several full score sketches marked by Eric Fenby as 'rejected'.

GB-Lbl (British Library, London) MS Mus. 1745/1/39. Link to external resource

British Library source record

Sketch material

[Classification: notated music, manuscript, autograph, short score, sketch]

Short-score pencil sketches including a draft of the middle section and early versions of music from other sections. Inscribed by Eric Fenby: 'A sketch strip of "The Song of the High Hills" carried by Delius on his walking tours in Norway - Eric Fenby to Franz Holford, 1948'.

GB-Lbl (British Library, London) MS Mus. 1823. Link to external resource

British Library source record

Sketch material

[Classification: notated music, manuscript, autograph, sketch]

Several sketches for the work, all annotated by Fenby as material for The Song of the High Hills.

AUS-PVgm (Grainger Museum, Melbourne) MG C2/DELI-27-2-1.

Sketches and drafts

[Classification: notated music, manuscript, autograph, draft]

This manuscript contains various sketches and several draft scores in ink and pencil. Interestingly, the work is given various titles, including 'Mountain Sounds', 'Songs of Nature' and 'The Song of the Mountains'. See Threlfall's comments in RT.1986, 39.

GB-Lbl (British Library, London) MS Mus. 1745/2/13/5. Link to external resource

British Library source record

Published score

[Classification: notated music, print, score, first edition, complete]

F.E.C. Leuckart, Leipzig 1915.

The first edition for Leuckart was transferred to Universal Edition in 1921, with several subsequent reissues.

Thomas Beecham's copy

Beecham's copy bears his performance indications.

Delius Trust, London.

Collected Edition

[Classification: notated music, print, score, later edition, complete]

Editor: Thomas Beecham

Universal Edition, London 1986.

A new engraving of the work, constituting vol. 11b of the Collected Edition

Performances

Last changed 2020-10-26T14:17:03+00:00