The Bauer memoirs are certainly rather randomly put together in a rather casual, chatty style and I certainly wouldn't rely on them for absolute accuracy. However, certain aspects of this "Delius Symphony" question still pose a puzzle. Bauer , who had been living in Paris and knew Delius well, had been invited to the USA to perform with the Boston Symphony Orchestra; the archives of the Boston orchestra show that he first performed with them (Brahms D minor Concerto) on 30 November 1900 with Gericke conducting , so that part of the tale adds up. At another point in the memoirs Bauer tells how he had sailed to the USA in order to make his debut on the "Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse" and encountered some terribly stormy during which "A wave burst into the cabin...and I was greatly concerned for the manuscript of Fritz Delius' symphony which, as related elsewhere, I had promised to submit to the conductor of the Boston Symphony. Fortunately no damage was done to the music."
This incident certainly appears to date the "Symphony" as having existed in 1900. The fact that Bauer refers to a "Manuscript" makes me wonder if the piece might have been an early draft of "Sea Drift" or , indeed, another Whitman-inspired work of symphonic proportions which has subsequently been lost or mislaid.
I thought I would show this to Stephen Lloyd who has been associated with the Delius Society for quite some time. Here is Stephen's observation:-
"It seems likely that Harold Bauer has got his dates wrong. He must surely be referring to Sea Drift in which Delius memorably set words from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. But that was first performed, in Germany, in 1906, so 1900 cannot be correct. The term ‘symphony’ has loosely been used to describe certain other works of Delius’s: The Song of the High Hills has been referred to by one or two commentators as a choral symphony, and we find Jelka Delius in 1918 writing ‘Fred has quite finished his Symphony’ when referring to A Poem of Life and Love which is far from being a symphony. Delius certainly wrote no symphony as such and I feel fairly sure that Bauer must have been referring to Sea Drift." Stephen Lloyd
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