Feature: Programme Music          Back to Features page
 Symphonic Stories - click to listen   Frederick (Theodore
Albert) Delius On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring  Royal
Philharmonic Orchestra  Richard Cooke (Conductor)    Programme
music is a term originally coined by Franz Liszt for largely
instrumental music that narrates or illustrates a literary or
pictorial scene.  Famous examples include Berlioz's Symphonie
Phantastique and Vivaldi's Four Seasons, but there are many
other delightful programmatic works.  Rather than directly
illustrating a story, On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring
tries to evoke the mood of a specific moment in time.  Frederick
Delius was born in England and grew up in the northern city of
Bradford at the end of the nineteenth century. While it is true
to say that his music draws on his childhood experiences of the
Yorkshire Dales, the inspiration for this work comes from a
point later in his life when, after working on an orange
plantation in Florida, he went to compose in Fra