Interview, Sir Mark Elder and Roderick Williams on Delius's A Mass of Life

Released on LAWO last year, Sir Mark Elder's studio recording of Delius's Nietszche-inspired Mass of Life was a finalist in the Choral Category at this year's Gramophone Awards, alongside Paul McCreesh's account of Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius (which eventually took the laurels) and Will Vann's interpretation of Parry's Prometheus Unbound.

I sat down with Sir Mark and Roderick Williams (who sings the vast central role of Zarathustra) to find out more about the challenges involved in getting a handle on this weird and wonderful work and the philosophy which inspired it, their own personal histories with Delius's music, their experience of performing the piece live in Bergen, and the virtual participation of the Choir Of The Earth (which saw singers from around the world joining in for the concerts).

It seems quite incongruous to have a 'Mass' setting texts by a writer who famously proclaimed that 'God is dead'! Is the title perhaps a little misleading?

ME: The title is the only thing about this piece that’s a disaster! It puts people off, because it gives the wrong impression before anyone has heard a note. It’s a humanist, Nietzsche-inspired work about the life-force – it’s got nothing whatsoever to do with religion and the church.

RW: I was thinking about this the other day in relation to Brahms, who decided to write a requiem in the vernacular without mentioning God or Jesus once: he still sets Biblical text, but avoids any of the actual Requiem Mass text. Then Bernstein comes along thinking: ‘Right, what does this word ‘Mass’ mean, and what can I do with it?’ So I can see what Delius was thinking, but I have to agree with Mark. It’s the old Hollywood approach: ‘Ditch the title!!’

How well does the piece travel?

ME: In my experience this man’s music is never going to appeal to the entire musical brotherhood of nations. But I think this is a major work on any level, not just in terms of Britain or even Europe: it’s a world-beater. What’s so strong about the Life Mass is that it can make a very strong impact on the first hearing. The way he’s planned and built it is superb – for instance, the ecstasy and energy of the first chorus being immediately followed by this dancing piece for Roddy at the beginning. It’s so vivid, and it includes so much variety and contrast.

RW: I love taking music of which I am a fan to other countries. However because of Delius's European connections it’s not quite the same as taking a piece by John Ireland or even Vaughan Williams onto the continent. I find it a huge compliment that the orchestra in Bergen and chorus took it on with such commitment and seriousness.

ME: No-one else has Delius's acute sensitivity, intensity and timing, and essentially it comes from the harmony and the way that harmony moves. That’s the biggest challenge doing Delius, whether it’s a small piece or a large one – you have to take time for everybody to start hearing the way the harmony goes, not just their own part. We had two weeks in Bergen, rehearsing, performing it twice and then recording. And I became aware as the week went on that everybody was beginning to hear the harmony as I was hearing it, and everybody welcomed it. 

I don’t think the people who dismiss his music have ever been through that process. A close friend and colleague of ours recently did a very famous piece of Delius with a very famous orchestra which is not unallied to our capital city…and they looked at him with absolute horror! I find this quite often in England: it’s as if our guys just haven’t got the patience.

RW: Part of the difficulty is that when you practise your part by yourself it has no shape or form  – it meanders, and you spend time thinking ‘How am I going to pitch that next entry? Nobody seems to be playing my note, I don’t know where I fit in the chord..’. I’ve had similar experiences with Sea Drift (I suppose the clue’s in the title!). So that experience which Mark describes of bedding everything in so that you know where you fit in relation to everything else is crucial.

ME: One day I must find out a bit more about the circumstances for Charles Groves’s recording…I think Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was originally booked for the baritone solo, but withdrew at very short notice and was replaced by the late Benjamin Luxon (who was magnificent). But certainly our recording was the first in a very long time to have the luxury of such exhaustive preparation, and if that comes across in the final edit then I’ll be really happy.

Tell me a little about the remote participation of Choir of the Earth in the live performance…

ME: A tape of our performance was sent out round the world and Choir of the Earth made their own tape on top of it. I find that incredible, and it meant that so many different choirs could find a way into the piece.

RW: At the heart of it we had the Edvard Grieg Kor, who are like a crack squad of stormtroopers: we had one professional singer on each part of the double choir, and each of them wore a microphone so that they could relay their in-concert experience back as a guide track for the remote participants. You could sign up for whatever vocal line you fancied, and I know that various members of Choir of the Earth were singing multiple parts! I occasionally meet people (either online or in reality) who tell me that they sang A Mass of Life with me in Bergen from Kentucky or wherever! That’s the point of Choir of the Earth - it’s an incredible bonding experience.

ME: That’s wonderful – Kentucky Fried Delius!

RW: 'Finger-licking good'…I’ll stop now!

Was the piece new to either of you?

ME:  It was an incredible journey together, because there was a certain apprehension and lack of experience which we all felt. I’m so grateful to the Bergen Philharmonic for agreeing to do it like this: I mentioned this work to their team when I first floated the idea that I might have a position with them, and I’m thrilled that we made it! I’d never conducted the piece before, but I think Roddy had sung it elsewhere?

RW: Yes, but that was a completely different experience: the whole project was so high-speed that it left little impact on me other than a vague memory that I’d enjoyed it but had to have my wits about me! But we didn’t have anything like enough time to sit and think about things. I love engaging with text, and Mark revealed so much about that to me in our lovely chats with our German-language specialist Norbert Heiner. We just sat and considered what we wanted to say, and that time was so well spent.

ME: And it’s not so straightforward, is it? There are choices. The challenge of doing Delius is knowing when to stretch and when to move on. You can’t have an intense moment every other bar: the music has to find its natural flow. And that’s another reason why one needs time.

RW: Doing two live performances helped: I love looking into people’s faces and seeing how they react, and the Bergen audiences are particularly warm. Then we took a good weekend off – Mark went on a boat trip and I went driving around the fjords, which gave us a chance to think things over before the red light went on. I remember Mark making some quite miraculous adjustments to the balance during the sessions themselves.

ME: I’m a great believer in marinating – something goes on even when you’re not doing anything. People went off and did other things that weekend but the piece was still churning around in people’s minds, bodies and hearts…and I think that had a huge role to play in the extent to which we all got into it. I had orchestra members coming up to me in the breaks between sessions saying: ‘This is so beautiful and I’m so glad we did it – to begin with I wasn’t sure, but now I am!’. That’s what one wants to hear.

Mark, is this a difficult score to balance?

ME: Yes, but only in the sense that it’s part of that late nineteenth-century Germanic Romantic tradition. You have to have a real sense of what you want when you’re doing Wagner for instance, otherwise the singers can be obliterated. The balance issues require some careful thinking about the style of sound: the trick is not to attack unless it’s a real requirement, which creates a texture where the singers can use colours. I said that to Roddy right from the beginning: ‘This won’t work if you’re singing at full volume all the time because you’re worried that you won’t be heard. Let’s approach it like Lieder!’. We took it further in the recording of course, because the microphone is a great adjunct to that.

RW: One or two movements put me in mind of some Strauss songs for voice and orchestra which I did in Manchester with Mark’s ‘Other Band’: Strauss called them not ‘Lieder’ but ‘Gesänge’, and it’s very different from the intimacy of voice and piano writing. I don’t expect I’ll ever be asked to sing them again but they’re wonderful, and the solo movement for me and the orchestra in the Delius Mass do remind me of them in their intricacy and free-spirited thinking. 

I also want to touch on the quality of the choral singing again: there’s something magical about having all these wonderful singers gathered in a city on the edge of the fjords with the time to invest in projects like this. When we did Peter Grimes in concert they sang the whole thing off-copy, because that’s the way they commit. The chorus for that opera would usually be 40-80 people, but we had almost 200 - and we had similar numbers for the Delius, with its extraordinary writing for double choir.

Mark’s already mentioned how that ecstatic opening chorus comes out of the stable at full pelt, and you need people who have the vocal stamina and musicality to engage with that. For my money they have the agility of a chamber choir, with the numbers of a full symphony chorus. Håkon Matti Skrede clearly trains them within an inch of their lives and they love him! That meant that Mark could play them like an organ - they just seemed able to do whatever he asked.

One of those young singers asked me to thank you, Mark, for creating such a kind and supportive atmosphere in the sessions - something which restored their faith in this profession after the vicissitudes of lockdown…

ME: I’m so happy and touched to hear that, because everything that we do is about trying to make a difference to people’s lives in the end. What we dream of as musicians is sharing what we love and believe in with as wide a group of people as is humanly possible, and when that happens it somehow   makes it all worthwhile.

Roddy, you mentioned the importance of doing detailed work on the text: where do you start with something as complex as Nietzsche?!

RW: It is thorny, and it was hard to know where to begin! It was a case of reading it through and scratching my head, then looking at the English texts under the words to see where it varies from the German. It was great to have discussions with people like Norbert about not only what it means, but what it means to a German person specifically: he told me he’d wrestled with Nietzsche as an impressionable teenager, and then we got talking about my son who was twenty at the time…

I don’t mention work stuff to my kids very often, but when I told him about this project he said ‘Oh blimey, Nietzsche…watch yourself there, Dad!’. He too has had that long dark night of the soul in the course of exploring Nietzsche’s writing, and he described it as having to pull back from the abyss. It was fascinating to hear the thoughts of an impressionable young man recognising the darkness in a lot of his work. But Zarathustra is quite different - that isn’t where Nietzsche’s going with this particular set of texts. There are some dark moments for sure, but it seems to me that he’s always crawling towards the light. 

ME: My first steps were to get advice about a good English translation, and to investigate the texts which Delius read around Nietzsche to get some sense of where he was coming from. Through doing that I realised that Delius wasn’t so much interested in the philosophy: he was interested in the poetic imagery and power of the verses, and the passages that he selected were pegs under which he could put his own incredible musical imagination. For me, exploring all of that was a really good starting point, rather than just thinking ‘Dear god, how am I going to understand Nietzsche well enough to interpret this music?!’.

RW: When I’m writing music, which I do from time to time (!), I don’t sit there thinking ‘I must leave something behind for humanity’. But looking at Delius’s cherry-picking of texts, I sensed that he was selecting sentences that are going to be of benefit afterwards - and that in itself is an act of humanistic generosity. Look at that last movement and where he leaves us: with this overwhelming sense of generosity of spirit. This recording comes at a time when the world has turned on its dark side (as Michael Tippett says in A Child of Our Time), and it’s so good to be reminded of the draw towards the light. That’s what Delius is doing here.