 An ability to construct long musical paragraphs is, according to the Delius scholar Christopher Palmer, Delius's lasting debt to Wagner, from whom he also acquired a knowledge of chromatic harmonic technique, "an endlessly proliferating sensuousness of sound".Grieg, however, was perhaps the composer who influenced him more than any other.The Norwegian composer, like Delius, found his primary inspiration in nature and in folk-melodies, and was the stimulus for the Norwegian flavour that characterises much of Delius's early music.