On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring

• On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring is a tone poem which Delius composed in 1912. It is the second piece in his set Two Pieces for Small Orchestra (the other is Summer Night on the River.¹
• In this tone poem, Delius quotes a Norwegian folksong that he knew from an arrangement by his friend Edvard Grieg: “I Ola-Dalom, i Ola-Kjinn”²

In Ola valley, in Ola tarn,
It’s there that Øli lost her son.
Bells tolled in the valley, they tolled in the tarn,
But never did Øli’s son return.

From the folk song “I Ola-Dalom, i Ola-Kjinn”

• In his article “Grieg, Delius, Grainger and a Norwegian Cuckoo,” Trevor Hold suggests that Delius used this folk tune because Grieg’s arrangement of it featured a cadence of a falling minor third which sounds like a cuckoo call.³
  • Delius loved visiting Norway, and he had a cottage there.

“Spring always means for me a longing for Norway.”

Frederick Delius, in a letter to Percy Grainger, Jan. 1914 ⁴

• Did Delius actually hear a first cuckoo in spring to inspire this piece? We know he heard one in his garden at Grez-sur-Long, in France, in 1916:

“I heard the cuckoo for the first time the day before yesterday!”

Delius, in a letter to Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock)⁵

1. Lionel Carley, Robert Anderson, and Anthony Payne, “Delius, Frederick,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed August 29, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000049095.
2. Trevor Hold, “Grieg, Delius, Grainger and a Norwegian Cuckoo” (Tempo, New Series, no. 203, 1998), 14, JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/946263.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 12.
5. Martin Lee-Browne and Paul Guinery, Delius and His Music (Woodbrigde, England: Boydell Press, 2014), 312.