Commissioned by the famous American music patron Elisabeth Sprague Coolidge, the Legend for viola and piano was the last of Bax's many works for viola. It also marked the end of his long collaboration with violist Lionel Tertis, whom Bax had met back in 1903 while the latter was a student at the Royal Academy of Music and the former a professor of viola. Their last performance together was the premiere of the Legend, at London's Aeolian Hall on December 7, 1929.

The Legend is probably Bax's most restrained and least virtuosic composition for the viola. This work of ten minutes' duration begins portentously with grand gestures from the piano. Once the mood is set, the viola joins in with a dark song that grows more passionate as it develops. A slow ascending and descending figure for the piano underlies the rhapsodic central section. Once built up, however, the energy spends itself and the work ends in a mood of quiet nostalgia.

© Chris Morrison, Rovi