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.