For Delius, the decade of the 1920s was a chronicle of wavering health and general decline, as the syphilitic infection he contracted in the 1890s began to tighten its grip. In 1920 he was still ambulatory, though his hands had become so shaky that he composed with difficulty and by dictation. In the spring, as a bout of illness made composition impossible, he accepted a commission from London impresario Basil Deane to furnish incidental music for a production of James Elroy Flecker's play Hassan. Delius worked quickly, but his penciled drafts had to be sent to Philip Heseltine (known to all lovers of English song as Peter Warlock) to be made into fair copies. Through 1921 his disease was largely in remission. He visited Frankfurt, London, Bradford, and spent the summer in Norway, where he had a chalet built overlooking the valley of Gudbrandsdal, near the village of Lesjaskog. But with the new year, as he turned 60, he grew very weak in his limbs and retired to a spa in Wiesbaden for an extended stay, during which he was forbidden to walk and forced to put Heseltine under contribution again for correction of proofs of his Cello Concerto. Another remission allowed him to take his summer holiday in Norway, in his new chalet, though he was now obliged to walk with the aid of canes. At Lesjaskog, he began his Violin Sonata No. 2. For Delius, the gregarious bon vivant, 1923 opened with a giddy social round in Frankfurt—with visits by Percy Grainger and Hermann Scherchen—made more enjoyable by concerts devoted to his works, though as summer came on he was again interrupted by disease, obliging him to make a two-and-a-half month stay at Bad Oeynhausen, a spa near Hannover. After a number of delays, Hassan was scheduled for fall production in London, though, as Deane informed Delius, more music would be required. During his Norwegian summer holiday he attempted to supply the want, though by now he composed by dictation to his wife. A visit by Grainger, who anonymously composed a missing dance number and put the manuscript additions in order, saved the day. Back in Grez in October, Delius completed the Second Violin Sonata begun the year before, though from the concentration and melodic generosity of its single-movement fast-slow-fast arch one could hardly guess the trying circumstances of its composition. The Wigmore Hall premiere was given by Albert Sammons, with Evleyn Howard Jones on October 7, 1924.

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