“Everything I wanted to say about Frederick Delius is in the film!” So revealed Eric Fenby soon after its emergence. SONG OF FAREWELL, the 1982 documentary on Fenby's relationship with the great Bradford-born composer and his role in facilitating his final pieces, is being screened at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough.

In the town where Fenby was born and raised, its internationally acclaimed director-producer Nick Gray is to introduce it and explore how it turned out to be Fenby’s own great valediction as well as his tribute to the composer he most admired and who had shaped his life.

“It is somehow incredibly fitting the film is being run in the very building that opened as the Odeon in 1936, which both Fenby and the famous local-born actor Charles Laughton attended,” says Nick. “It was not too long after Eric had returned home after Delius’s death.”

Fenby offered his services as amanuensis to Delius, in 1928, when he was only 22, some forty-four years younger than one of the country’s finest composers, alas then blind and crippled. His offer gratefully accepted, he worked at Delius’s home, in Grez-sur-Loing, near Paris, for extended periods until his death in 1934.

In his book, Delius As I Knew Him, Fenby spoke of the 'amazing coda' to the composer’s career which included the eponymous Song of Farewell, Caprice and Elegy and the third Violin Sonata. It is impossible to know - and Fenby was too modest to blow his own trumpet - how much this late flowering owes its very existence to his astonishing act of altruism in dedicating six years of his life to it.

At the very least, Fenby brought youthful energy and the technical ability to faithfully transcribe the master’s dictation of complex orchestral scores, note by painstaking note, bar by intricate bar. Indeed, it has been speculated that Fenby, a fine composer in his own right in later years and Professor of Harmony at the Royal Academy of Music, London, was no mere passive scribe, but an active collaborator, a sounding board, who genuinely intuited the spirit of what was being created.

“What Fenby did is universally recognised as an achievement unparalleled in the history of music,” says Nick, with feeling. “He was over 70 at the time he agreed to place on film his final thoughts on the music of Delius, telling the story of his own musical upbringing and collaboration with him. As such, it is a unique document on two great musical figures.”

The special screening is something of a homecoming. “Filming started in Scarborough 44 years ago, in November 1981,” Nick recalls, “with Eric describing his musical upbringing in the town. At the time there were high winds and tumultuous seas, which suited both Delius’s music and Fenby’s description - as he says in the film - of ‘catching these last notes of Delius before they flew away.’”

Nick and the film crew accompanied Fenby over three cold weeks during November and December on his deeply emotional revisiting of the locations of his story, in Scarborough, Paris and London, during which time he revealed his occasionally stormy relationship with the composer.

“The six years they were together were quite extraordinary and deeply affecting,” Nick says. “I found him a charming man, a real gentleman, extremely considerate, and immensely patient with the filming process.”

The Times called it “a melancholy and moving programme, elegiac in tone, stunningly photographed and directed with a grace which perfectly complemented the music of Delius.” The Guardian declared: “After the Ken Russell drama-doc a few years back you’d think there was no more to be said, but there is, and Yorkshire Television have said it splendidly with the music of Delius.”

Nick has been a documentary-maker for forty years, making programmes for ITV, BBC, Channels 4 and 5, The Discovery Channel and National Geographic. His programmes, many of them groundbreaking exposés, have won BAFTA and INTERNATIONAL EMMY nominations, and many other national and international awards from, for example, the United Nations, the European Union, Amnesty International and the Vatican.

During the 30 years he spent with the Yorkshire arm of ITV, he actually made two films on Fenby’s association with Delius, as well as on many iconic figures of the White Rose county. “I got the idea to make it after seeing Eric on the Russell Harty chat show with Kate Bush.” Apparently the presenter had mischievously asked what Delius would have thought of the music of the pop singer. “‘He’d have liked it because it’s modern,’ Eric replied, diplomatically.”

After the success of his first film, he obtained funding for the major full-scale documentary for the ITV network, which we now have the chance to enjoy in this rare screening. The wonderful tribute to two major musical figures will no doubt be unusually nostalgic for locals, featuring as it does footage of Fenby at the Spa and on the beach at Cloughton Wyke.

“This was the last time Eric visited Grez-sur-Loing, and all the locations meant so much to him and were full of memories,” Nick says, finally, and not without a note of sadness. “In Delius’s house, he actually felt his presence. It was incredibly moving.”

We can expect, then, some spectacular photography and glorious music. No doubt we will feel Fenby’s presence, hear it in his own voice and words and in the music he helped to create, in this trip back more than 40 years - shown in his hometown where there are still people alive who remember him and his house in Avenue Road, with its lawn shaped like a grand piano!

SONG OF FAREWELL is screening in the McCarthy Cinema, at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, on November 22nd at 2.45pm.