Meanwhile Nils, a prince enslaved as a swineherd by the robber chief Rolf, breaks free and finds his way to Irmelin just after her enforced betrothal to one of the suitors.
He quickly became a member of an artistic circle that included well-known painters such as Paul Gauguin and Edvard Munch, but the Parisian musical scene seemed closed to him.
According to his biographer and champion Sir Thomas Beecham, "Throughout the first two years of his residence in and around Paris he was obsessed with the ambition to write an opera on some grand historical subject".
Beecham later maintained that the stories were "Northern and early medieval",[4] but subsequent research suggests that the main source was "Irmelin Rose", a poem by the 19th-century writer Jens Peter Jacobsen.
[6] According to the composer Peter Warlock (a disciple of Delius), although Grieg and Messager admired the score,[7] its composer "never seriously contemplated" a production of the opera,[8] but the musical scholar Jeremy Dibble writes that in the hope of a German production Delius travelled to Bayreuth to show the score to the Wagner conductor Hermann Levi.
Beecham's advocacy of the score and the "care with which he realizes each detail, the beauty of sound he elicits from his orchestra", were praised by the Opera critic, as was Dennis Arundell's production.
Scene 1 – a hall in the castle: Six months later, as the deadline set by the king for her to marry approaches, Irmelin still hopes that her prince will arrive.
[8] In Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Robert Anderson says of the text, "The libretto’s undoubted charm is somewhat obscured by its naivety and the banality of Delius’s attempts at rhyme", but he is more complimentary about the score, with its "telling use of motifs that are memorable and apt, economy in the setting of atmosphere, and ability to fill convincingly the large span of the three acts with an admirable sense of flow".