Delius' early years were uncommonly fraught with improbable adventure. Consider 1897: at the beginning of that year he returned to Florida with his friend, violinist Halfdan Jebe, ostensibly to make arrangements for the orange plantation he'd abandoned a decade earlier. Another explanation is the wish to give his Paris mistress, Princesse de Cystria, the slip. To his chagrin, with the New York-bound ship well out to sea, Delius discovered that she had followed him and was aboard. To allay the prudery attaching to a woman traveling with two men, the trio posed as itinerant musicians and, during a stopover at Danville, VA—where Delius had stayed the winter and spring of 1885-1886—they gave a concert, with Delius in propria persona at the piano, Jebe posing as one "Lemmanoff," and the princess, singing as "Madame Donodossola." In a letter from October 5, 1941, however, Percy Grainger stated that Delius returned to find his Negro mistress—"The 'Negress' story is quite true, for Delius told it to me himself, several times. He had a Negro mistress while in Florida & she had a child by him....But she (the Negress) thinking he might want to take the child away from her, fled. So Delius couldn't find her, his trip was for naught, & he never heard what became of her & the child." Back in Paris by the end of May, Delius began distancing himself from the princess as the prospect loomed of settling at the village of Grez-sur-Loing with painter Jelka Rosen, whom he married in 1903. In the summer, Norwegian playwright and theater producer Gunnar Heiberg approached Delius with a commission for incidental music to figure in his satirical comedy, Folkeraadet (People's Parliament). Delius fulfilled his charge before the end of September, when he visited Christiana to supervise rehearsals. Preludes to Acts 2, 3, and 5 had been wanted, to which Delius added a brief Overture on his arrival. Incongruously rounded off with a short melodrama, these five movements are sometimes offered as Delius' Norwegian Suite. Rife with broad contrasts, the music wears a generic air. Delius' use of Norway's national anthem in the Prelude to Act 2—a lightheartedly skipping account eschewing its usual pomposity—proved even more provocative than Heiberg's play, described by Robert Threlfall as "an amusing and trenchant satire of the Norwegian parliamentary system and its politicians." The premiere on October 18 proved so offensive that Delius was turned out of his hotel room.

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