蜜芽传媒

In 1928, Eric Fenby, a young organist from Yorkshire, heard a piece of music on the radio that changed his life. It was by the English composer Friedrich Delius, and Fenby thought it so beautiful, he had to meet him.

He learnt that Delius, now 66, was paralysed and blinded by illness - so he wrote to his house in France offering to take dictation and complete his final works. Delius accepted - and the story of their partnership is told in Ken Russell鈥檚 1968 film Song of Summer, which was rebroadcast last weekend on 蜜芽传媒4.

It鈥檚 a case study in why you should never meet your heroes. The illness turned out to be syphilis. Delius was nasty and egotistical. Moreover, Fenby was a devout Catholic and Delius, an atheist, mocked his Christianity.

That old debate about separating great art from flawed artists is one Catholics are painfully familiar with. The stations of the cross at Westminster Cathedral, depicting the crucifixion of Christ, were created by the sculptor Eric Gill, later revealed to have molested his own daughters. A Catholic artist once told me that the stations cannot be beautiful because the mind behind them was evil.

But I still think Gill鈥檚 work was brilliant. And I still think Delius was inspired by something beyond our ken.

Fenby persevered. For hours, he would sit at the piano and Delius would shout out notes he wanted him to write, their pitch, time, or phrase lengths, while Fenby desperately tried to jot it down. Together they created tone poems, recreating a scene in music - the most famous of which is the Song of Summer. The violins evoke the waves on a beach; the flute, a gull floating on the breeze.

Fenby looked after Delius till he died. Delius insisted he be buried in a churchyard in England. His composition 鈥渢he Mass of Life鈥�, a nonreligious worship of man鈥檚 potential, was played at the Proms this week.

Fenby later wrote that 鈥渢he musician Delius was greater than the man Delius鈥�. He argued that we should celebrate the individual鈥檚 talent and effort, but the impetus for creation ultimately comes from God: the artist is less a genius than a conduit.

I fell in love with Delius the musician when I first heard the Florida Suite, based upon his early life spent managing an orange plantation in America. I think it expresses the religious relationship with music - even though it is an entirely secular subject. Why? Because Delius evoked nature, which I believe is itself composed by God. And music鈥檚 ability to lift us out of time and space, to deposit us on an Atlantic shore, beneath a purple sunset, is a spiritual act.

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