Szymanowski wrote this dreamy, hedonistic song cycle for voice and piano in 1918, during a time he was particularly interested in fantasy and exoticism. He returned to the set in 1934, just before he stopped composing, and orchestrated four of the six songs, changing their order. He took his texts from Polish poet Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz.

The vocal line (along with the later orchestration) evokes the melismatic, improvisatory-sounding cry of the men who call Muslims to prayer, but it adds to this Middle Eastern exoticism a definite eroticism, a yearning harmonic ambiguity. The connection between prayer and carnal desire is most explicit in the song "Allah Akbar," in which the infatuated muezzin declares to his lover that Allah created her so the muezzin could praise God.

Certain moments may evoke Rimsky-Korsakov or Respighi, but Szymanowski's vocal line is truer to Middle Eastern vocalism, and his orchestration is ultimately more subtle than most works by those composers. The orchestration sounds rich, but that's due more to harmony than instrumentation. More often than not, Szymanowski obtains voluptuous effects simply by setting the voice against quiet strings, plus one solo instrument sliding into the line of another. A particularly effective example is "W poludnie" ("At Noon"), in which the flute eases its way down the staff, its line seamlessly transferred to, of all incompatible instruments, the piano.

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