Eine Messe des Lebens. Für Soli, Chor und Grosses Orchester. Nach Nietzsches Zarathustra zusammengestellt von F. Cassirer.

Berlin: Verlag Harmonie. [1905]. First edition. Klavierauszug mit Deutschen Worten von Otto Singer / Engl. Worte. v. John Bernhoff. Upright folio (27cm x 33cm), 210 pp. Original wrappers printed in red, scattered foxing to covers, spine heavily chipped at extremeties, otherwise in very fine condition. With the 1908 ownership signature on the upper front wrapper of English pianist, Arthur Alexander (1891 - ?) and with the later ownership signature of composer, Bernard Hermann on the title page. Threlfall II/4.


Frst edition of "A Mass of Life", one of the composer's greatest musical achievements. Completed in 1905, it was first performed by Sir Thomas Beecham in London in June 1909.


"'It would even be possible to consider all 'Zarathustra' as a musical composition', wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, pondering the great riddle-like prose-poem he had finished in 1885. Be that as it may: clearly no sound-board was more attuned to deepen the ring of Nietzsche's metaphors than the musical imagination of Frederick Delius. The suggestive power of its first response to poetic fragments from Zarathustra - The Midnight-Song given at the Delius concert in London in 1899 and later to become the spiritual axis of A Mass of Life - is so compelling that progression to the work in its present dimensions can now be seen to have been inevitable. Zarathustra is Nietzsche's conception of man at his highest as an individual. His sayings, biblical in style (and which in this recording are sung in German) affirm his doctrine of the man of the future; man as Superman; proud, energetic, strong, dominant, exceptional in his truthfulness, disdaining as weakness the old values of Christianity. Delius, though a man after Nietzsche's heart, had no place for preaching in his music. Through Fritz Cassirer's careful selection of passages suited peculiarly to Delius's musical temperament, a balanced sequence of eleven soliloquies was ultimately devised. Nevertheless, A Mass of Life - and I can imagine Delius's dry remarks on framing the title - is a choral celebration of the Will to say Yea! to life in the joy of the "Eternal Recurrence of all things" - Nietzsche's perennial theme - rather than in desistance from life, a slaying of self to gain the promise of "life-eternal". This is the music of Delius's full manhood - the music of a virile, healthy, fastidious man, a restless adventurer and climber of mountains: not yet the perpetual harper on transcience. The Mass is divided into Two Parts; the singers share the words of Zarathustra, personified in the baritone soloist, now declaiming, now meditating, now mingling dynamically as human instruments in the orchestral texture." (Eric Fenby, liner notes for the 1972 Angel/EMI recording conducted by Sir Charles Groves) (5535)

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