Delius’s Zarathustra

Abstract This essay is an assessment of Frederick Delius’s A Mass of Life, whose text is drawn from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The essay begins with an assessment of Zarathustra itself and of why Nietzsche might have welcomed its being set to music, before suggesting that Delius’s text—rather brutally culled from Nietzsche’s—in fact marks an improvement, in some respects, over the original. The setting has its distinctive strengths as well, indeed is sometimes almost too faithful to the spirit of its words, but in ways that are, first, partly adventitious and, second, unlikely to have been acknowledged by either Nietzsche or Delius. This essay seeks, in short, to do justice to both the strengths and the weaknesses of Delius’s Mass.