Szymanowski left London on the day Archduke Rudolph was assassinated in Sarajevo. On the continent, Szymanowski took the last regularly scheduled trains in a circuitous route to avoid Austria on his way to Tymoszówka, the family estate in Ukraine. Exempted from military service by a childhood knee injury, the composer refurbished a gardener's cottage there as a study amid a grove of oaks and lost himself in creative absorption of the overripe European milieu—preeminently, the impact of Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky—which was, at that moment, being transmogrified by political reality. The upshot was the series of works upon which his reputation largely rests—the Symphony No. 3 "Song of the Night", the Violin Concerto No. 1, the Métopes and Masques for piano, the Myths for violin and piano—composed in the space of a little more than two years. Stylistically, they mark a turning away from the fulsome formality of Reger (evident in Szymanowski's Symphony No. 2) and the garishly riotous post-Wagnerian sound world of Richard Strauss' Elektra and Salome toward a more elaborately and luridly refined decadence colored by excursions into Stendhal, Bergson, Pater, Persian poetry, and Euripides (whose Bacchae would provide inspiration for Szymanowski's testamentary opera King Roger), as well as memories of the Mediterranean and of real excursions to Sicily and north Africa, littered with Roman remains.

The splendid isolation of Tymoszówka was broken—or enhanced—by visits to neighboring estates, such as Józef Jaroszynski's Zarudzie, where Szymanowski's friend, the great violin virtuoso Pawel Kochánski, and his wife were staying, or to Ryzawka, the estate of August Iwánski, with whom Szymanowski developed a close friendship. From March to June, 1915, the composer had been occupied with the Myths, completed at Zarudzie, in which the new visionary style took—with technical advice from Kochánski—flamboyant wing. By contrast, the Nocturne & Tarantella catch Szymanowski in the moment of transition. Composed a bit before he embarked on Myths, the Nocturne is an alternately languid and febrile exercise in exoticism. The Tarantella, on the other hand, was sketched during an evening of drinking with Kochánski and Iwánski at Zarudzie some time after the completion of Myths, and makes a labored attempt at Dionysian frenzy. Together, they are engaging but not very deeply realized, suggesting parodies of Szymanowski's most opulent period—leading a number of critics to dismiss them as kitsch—unless projected with violin wizardry and sheer visceral intensity.

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