Frederick Delius's father lent him money to set up as a citrus grower in Florida (1884-6), where he had lessons with Thomas Ward; he then studied at the Leipzig Conservatory (1886-8) and met Grieg. He settled in Paris as a man of bohemian habits, a friend of Gauguin, Strindberg, Munch and others, until in 1897 he moved to Grez with Jelka Rosen, later his wife. There he remained.

He had written operas, orchestral pieces and much else before the move to Grez, but nearly all his regularly performed output dates from afterwards while looking back to the musical and other experiences of earlier years: the seamless flow of Wagner, the airier chromaticism of Grieg, the rich colouring of Strauss and Debussy, the existential independence of Nietzsche.

His operas A Village Romeo and Juliet (1901) and Fennimore and Gerda (1910) are love stories cast in connected scenes and examining spiritual states within a natural world. Nature is important too in such orchestral pieces as In a Summer Garden (1908), A Song of the High Hills (with wordless chorus, 1911) or A Song of Summer (1930), though there are other works in which the characteristic rhapsodizing is made to serve symphonic forms, notably the Violin Concerto (1916) and three sonatas for violin and piano (1914, 1923, 1930).

The choral works include two unaccompanied, wordless songs 'to be sung of a summer night on the water' (1917), the large-scale A Mass of Life with words from Nietzsche (1905) and a secular Requiem (1916). In the early 1920s he grew blind and paralysed as a result of syphilitic infection, and his last works were taken down by Eric Fenby.