The Walk to the Paradise Garden (from A Village Romeo and Juliet)

The Paradise Garden is not the idyllic place the name seems to suggest. It is the dilapidated inn by the river where the star-crossed lovers of Delius’s opera A Village Romeo and Juliet meet their death. They take refuge there after an unhappy experience at a village fair but, realising there is no future for them in the rural Swiss community in which they live, they set themselves adrift in a hay barge and sink from sight locked in each other’s arms. The orchestral intermezzo, which suggests the mood of the lovers as they walk hand in hand from the fair to the inn, was the last part of the work to be written, not long before the first performance of the opera in Berlin in 1907.

Frequently performed separately as a concert piece, The Walk to the Paradise Garden is one of the most inspired of all Delius’s nature studies and at the same time a pure distillation of the emotional content of the opera. The atmosphere is not one of impending doom, although that comes into it, but of romantic enchantment. Its begins in tranquillity with an introductory phrase on lower woodwind and horns and a tenderly expressive melody on muted cellos set against a counter melody on the oboe. The main theme, an upward yearning motif associated with the love of the young hero and heroine, makes its first appearance on clarinet and from then on it is woven into the fabric of the piece in a variety of shapes and colours and in rising and falling passionate intensity. Shortly after the central point where activity seems to ebb away on a repeated phrase in the woodwind, that same main theme motivates the emotional climax of the piece in ecstatic full-orchestral harmonies which, in anticipation of the end of the opera, turn suddenly and chillingly to the minor.