On the title-page it is described as a "Folk-Song (Eastern Europe),[1] paraphrased by Pietro d’Alba and Edward Elgar".
It was shortly after writing the song A Child Asleep for Muriel Foster, a few days before the Christmas of 1909 that Elgar received the news of the death of a friend the soprano Olga Ouroussoff, the young wife of Henry Wood.
It was orchestrated in July 1912 and, with its companion song The Torch, it was first performed by Muriel Foster at the Hereford Music Festival on 11 September 1912.
At the end of the manuscript Elgar wrote (Leyrisch-Turasp 1909), which mysterious "place-name" Jerrold Northrop Moore[3] suggests was Elgar's anagram of a German version of Peter Rabbit: Petrus Has[e] Lyric.
• NOTE-… “The river was in full flood and, had it remained so another twenty-four hours, would undoubtedly have overwhelmed the enemy : but it sank far below its normal level more rapidly than it had risen three days before.”