ABSTRACT
Frederick Delius’s assessment of himself may seem surprising, since with Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst he is regarded, at least in continental Europe, as one of the major English composers. In the end Delius wrote the libretto himself in English, and it cannot be denied, despite all the objections of those involved with the premiere that he succeeded in transferring the novella to the operatic stage extremely well, in language that is never overcharged. Even though Delius’s wife was German, and even though he himself mingled with countless German artists and not least came of a German family, his letters show that his German was not quite perfect. Delius and his wife never themselves made a German-language version of the libretto of The Magic Fountain in parallel with the English original, as they did with A Village Romeo and Juliet.
