[2] Helped by his wife’s sister, the designer Gwen Raverat, Keynes selected eight of Blake's 21 illustrations as suitable for stage adaptation.

He had a low opinion of classical ballet, detested dance en pointe, and regarded Diaghilev's troupe as "decadent and frivolous".

[4] After Diaghilev's rejection of the piece, the Keynes brothers – Geoffrey and Maynard – together with the composer Thomas Dunhill agreed to fund a staging of the work by the recently formed Camargo Society.

[6] Vaughan Williams had written for a large orchestra, too big for a West End theatre pit, and Constant Lambert undertook a reduction of the score for smaller forces.

The cast comprised: The production was repeated the next day and again on 24 July at Oxford as part of the ninth festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music.

The critic A. K. Holland, reporting "a tumultuous reception", called the work "a triumph for Vaughan Williams ... the most important recent contribution to English ballet".

From 1932 onwards it remained in the Vic-Wells (later Sadler's Wells) Ballet repertoire and was first presented on the large stage of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in May 1948.

[15] Raverat's original sets were considered unsuitable for the large Covent Garden stage, and new designs were commissioned from John Piper.