Editing Arnold Bax (section)

===Early career===
{{Quote box| quoted=true|width=30%|bgcolor=#FFFFF0|align=right|quote= I worked very hard at the Irish language and steeped myself in its history and saga, folk-tale and fairy-lore.&nbsp;... Under this domination, my musical style became strengthened&nbsp;... I began to write Irishly, using figures and melodies of a definitely Celtic curve.|salign = right|source= Bax in his memoirs, 1943<ref>Bax, p. 41</ref>}}
Musically, Bax veered away from the influence of Wagner and Strauss, and deliberately adopted what he conceived of as a Celtic idiom. In 1908 he began a cycle of tone poems called ''Eire'', described by his biographer [[Lewis Foreman]] as the beginning of the composer's truly mature style. The first of these pieces, ''Into the Twilight'', was premiered by [[Thomas Beecham]] and the [[New Symphony Orchestra (London)|New Symphony Orchestra]] in April 1909, and the following year, at Elgar's instigation, [[Henry Wood]], commissioned the second in the cycle, ''[[In the Faëry Hills]]''.<ref name=f66>Foreman (1971), p. 66</ref>  The work received mixed notices. ''[[The Manchester Guardian]]'''s reviewer wrote, "Mr Bax has happily suggested the appropriate atmosphere of mystery";<ref>"Music in London", ''The Manchester Guardian'', 31 August 1910, p. 6</ref> ''[[The Observer]]'' found the piece "very undeterminate and unsatisfying, but not difficult to follow".<ref>"Music: The Promenades", ''The Observer'', 4 September 1910, p. 4</ref> ''[[The Times]]'' commented on the "rather second-hand language" at some points, derivative of Wagner and Debussy, although "there is still a great deal which is wholly individual".<ref>"Promenade Concerts", ''The Times'', 31 August 1910, p. 9</ref> ''[[The Musical Times]]'' praised "a mystic glamour that could not fail to be felt by the listener" although the coherence of the piece "was not instantly discernible".<ref>[http://www.jstor.org/stable/906005 "The Promenade Concerts"], ''The Musical Times'', October 1910, pp. 657–658 {{subscription required}}</ref> A third work in the cycle, ''Roscatha'', was not performed in the composer's lifetime.{{refn|The work was recorded in 1985 by the [[Ulster Orchestra]] conducted by [[Bryden Thomson]].<ref>[https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/71761312 "The tale the pine-trees knew; Into the twilight; In the faery hills; Roscatha"], WorldCat, retrieved 16 September 2015</ref>|group=n}}

Bax's private means enabled him to travel to the [[Russian Empire]] in 1910. He was in pursuit of [[Natalia Skarginska]], a young Ukrainian whom he had met in London – one of several women with whom he fell in love over the years.<ref name=f67>Foreman (1983), p. 67</ref> The visit eventually proved a failure from the romantic point of view but musically enriched him. In [[Saint Petersburg]] he discovered and immediately loved ballet; he absorbed Russian musical influences that inspired material for the First Piano Sonata, the piano pieces, "May Night in the Ukraine" and "Gopak", and the First Violin Sonata, dedicated to Skarginska.<ref name=archive/><ref name=f67/> Foreman describes him in this period as "a musical magpie, celebrating his latest discoveries in new compositions"; Foreman adds that Bax's own musical personality was strong enough for him to assimilate his influences and make them into his own.{{refn|Foreman lists among those who influenced Bax: Wagner, Strauss, Debussy, the Russian "Five" ([[Mily Balakirev|Balakirev]], [[César Cui|Cui]], [[Modest Mussorgsky|Mussorgsky]], [[Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov|Rimsky-Korsakov]] and [[Alexander Borodin|Borodin]]), [[Alexander Glazunov|Glazunov]], [[Maurice Ravel|Ravel]], [[Jean Sibelius|Sibelius]] and early [[Igor Stravinsky|Stravinsky]].<ref name=dnb/>|group= n}} Russian music continued to influence him until the First World War. An unfinished ballet ''Tamara'', "a little-Russian fairy tale in action and dance", provided material the composer reused in post-war works.<ref name=dnb/>

Having given up his pursuit of Skarginska, Bax returned to England; in January 1911 he married the pianist Elsita Luisa Sobrino (b. 1885 or 1886), daughter of the teacher and pianist, Carlos Sobrino, and his wife, Luise, ''née'' Schmitz, a singer.{{refn|Luise taught at the Hampstead Conservatoire, and Bax had known Elsita since his time there.<ref>Scott-Sutherland, p. 30</ref>|group= n}} Bax and his wife lived first in Chester Terrace, [[Regent's Park]], London,<ref>Foreman (1983), p. 83</ref> and then moved to Ireland, taking a house in [[Rathgar]], a well-to-do suburb of Dublin.<ref>Foreman (1983), p. 96</ref> They had two children, Dermot (1912–1976) and Maeve Astrid (1913–1987).<ref>Foreman (1983), p. 95</ref>  Bax became known in Dublin literary circles under the pseudonym "Dermot O'Byrne"; he mixed with the writer [[George William Russell]] and his associates, and published stories, verses and a play.<ref>Foreman (1983), p. 89</ref> Reviewing a selection of the prose and poetry reissued in 1980, Stephen Banfield found most of Bax's earlier poems "like his early music, over-written, cluttered with the secondhand lumber of early Yeats, though the weakness is one of loosely chosen language rather than complexity." Banfield had better things to say of the later poems, where Bax "focuses matters, whether laconically and colloquially upon the grim futility of the 1916 [[Easter rising|Easter Uprising]]&nbsp;... or pungently upon his recurrent disillusionment about love."<ref>Banfield, p. 781</ref>  Some of Bax's writings as O'Byrne were regarded as subversively sympathetic to the [[Irish republicanism|Irish republican]] cause, and the government censor prohibited their publication.<ref>Jeffery, p. 94</ref>