Bax was generally associated with music that the 1955 reference work The Record Guide called "intrinsically noble, humane, and capable of a certain melancholy grandeur".
When Sir Hamilton Harty approached him in 1930 to write a short overture for the Hallé Orchestra, Bax promised him "Straussian pastiche", and produced what the composer's biographer, Lewis Foreman calls "this memorable and high-spirited score complete with lapses into waltz time.
"[2] The word "picaresque" is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as designating "a genre of narrative fiction which deals episodically with the adventures of an individual, usually a roguish and dishonest but attractive hero".
[3] The critic Neville Cardus thought the work so appealing that to live up to the overture the putative comedy would have to be "written by Hofmannsthal and Shaw in collaboration.
[6] In between the bustling themes that begin and close the nine-minute work is a waltz in the promised Straussian pastiche, in which, Cardus commented, Strauss's characters Octavian, the Marschallin and Till Eulenspiegel play hide and seek.