Delius' fantasy overture Over the Hills and Far Away may have been begun as early as 1893 and was certainly completed by 1897, if not earlier, but documentation for those years—among the most fascinating and formative of Delius' life—is sparse. Enabled by an allowance from his father, a well-to-do wool merchant, Delius entered the fabled decade of the 1890s embracing the life of a bohemian artist, living on the outskirts of Paris and consorting with a fantastic array of artists and eccentrics. By the opening of the 1890s Satie was already ensconced at the legendary Chat Noir cabaret—there is no evidence that his path crossed Delius', though it easily could have. But Gauguin, Mucha, Munch, Strindberg, Florent Schmitt (whom Delius engaged to make piano transcriptions of his operas), Jean Richepin (demimonde poet and Chabrier's sometime librettist), Richard Le Gallienne, and Gérard Encausse were boon companions. Under the pseudonym Papus, the latter was an intrepid negotiator of the occult crosscurrents rife through the 1890s and into the twentieth century. Satie wrote music for Papus' Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Croix and in 1894 Encausse published Anatomie et physiologie de l'orchestra, co-authored with Delius. Always industrious, by 1893 Delius had all but abandoned composition to throw himself wholeheartedly into the study of astrology and was soon casting horoscopes for friends. Strindberg was a student of alchemy and claimed to have performed alchemical transmutations, though it is also known that (like Gustav Meyrink) he took literally the alchemists' enigmatic direction that the Philosopher's Stone—the agent of transmutation—is "found in filth" and delved in ancient water closets. Delius opera The Magic Fountain, which occupied him over 1893-1895, is, not coincidentally, concerned with a quest for the Fountain of Youth. In his Recollections of Strindberg, Delius described an after-dinner séance—"The lights were turned down and we joined hands around a small table. After ten minutes' ominous silence the table began to rap and Leclercq asked it what message the spirits had for us. The first letter rapped out was 'M', and with each letter Strinberg's interest and excitement seemed to increase, and slowly came the momentous letters 'M E R D E'. I do not think he ever quite forgave us." Summer excursions in the Norwegian mountains provided bracing relief from this decadent hothouse, reflected in the sense of vast distance, Nature's mysterious quietude, and heroic derring-do beneath clear sunlit skies palpable in Over the Hills and Far Away.

© Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide