When Hassan reached the stage of His Majesty's Theatre, London, on September 20, 1923, it arrived out of a web of destinies almost as quixotic as the spectacle itself. The play's author, James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915), had been dead eight years. Its champion, producer Basil Dean, had seen the work through a series of revisions and postponements from before the Great War and had considered a number of composers—including Ravel—for the copious amount of incidental music it would require. A chance hearing of A Village Romeo and Juliet in the spring of 1920 persuaded him that Delius was his man. Delius, in failing health, was ever more dependent on royalties from the sale of his scores. Once his enthusiasm had been sparked, work proceeded rapidly, with Philip Heseltine writing the composer's pencilled drafts into full score, and the original version of the music was completed before year's end. Despite Flecker's modest success while he lived, Hassan had generated a large posthumous interest, and further delays handed the premiere, in German translation and employing Delius' original score, to Darmstadt, at the Hessische Landes-Theater on June 1, 1923. Meanwhile, for the London production, more music was required, and Delius, now firmly in the grip of the syphilitic infection, working against time and unable to hold a pencil, dictated the new pieces to his wife. When Percy Grainger dropped by on a chance visit, he was pressed into service to compose, anonymously, a brief section of the Act II ballet. The London production of Hassan proved a considerable success, opening before a distinguished audience and running for a respectable 281 performances to glowing critical notices. Delius was able to attend the last rehearsals and the virtuosic first night, with Eugene Goosens conducting.

Hassan is a curiously distinguished item in that seemingly inexhaustible vogue for orientalia which includes, among hundreds of ephemeral oddments, Gilbert and Sullivan's surefire Mikado (1885), Edward Knoblock's wildly successful play, Kismet (1911), the phenomenally long-running Asche/Norton musical, Chu Chin Chow (l916), and Puccini's enduring Turandot (1926). Though minor, Flecker's vein of poetry was genuine. Said to have been inspired by a volume of farcical plays which he read in Turkish, Flecker's verse nevertheless owes everything to Edwardian notions of "elevated" language, while its "orientalism" harks back to Edward Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubaiyat. Thus, a banal tale of intrigue, betrayal, romance, and sudden shifts of fortune is given dignity by a languorous beauty and mild satire highlighting an inevitable disillusionment. And it was, no doubt, this eloquence born of deep disenchantment which led Delius to compose some of his most straightforwardly enchanting music.

The numbers range from fanfares, melodramas, choruses, interludes—some of them snippets but a few bars long—and brief atmospheric preludes to the celebrated, wordlessly vocalized, Serenade (heard thrice) and an elaborate ballet sequence (choreographed for the lavish London production by no less than Michel Fokine). Despite his discomfiture by the limitations of a 26-instrument theater orchestra, nearly everything he composed for Hassan is rife with Delian touches—meltingly evocative choral apostrophes, some preludes so imbued with Delian nostalgia as to be abbreviated tone poems, and the final superbly moving chorus, "We take the golden road to Samarkand." The upshot was an aureate, slightly bittersweet, post-Romantic confection wholly out of touch with the Jazz Age antics which surrounded it.



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