Editing Arnold Bax (section)

===First World War===
At the beginning of the war Bax returned to England. A heart complaint, from which he suffered intermittently throughout his life, made him unfit for military service; he acted as a [[special constable]] for a period.<ref name=dnb/><ref name=grove/> At a time when fellow composers including Vaughan Williams, [[Arthur Bliss]], [[George Butterworth]] and [[Ivor Gurney]] were serving overseas, Bax was able to produce a large body of music, finding, in Foreman's phrase, "his technical and artistic maturity" in his early thirties.  Among his better-known works from the period are the orchestral [[symphonic poem|tone poems]] ''[[November Woods]]'' (1916) and  ''[[Tintagel (Bax)|Tintagel]]'' (1917–19).<ref name=grove/>

[[File:Sackville Street (Dublin) after the 1916 Easter Rising.JPG|alt=external scene showing ruined buildings in a city street|thumb|left|The Easter rising in Dublin and its aftermath shocked and distressed Bax]]
{{Quote box|width=25%|bgcolor=#FFFFF0|align=right|quote=And when the devil's made us wise<br>
Each in his own peculiar hell<br>
With desert hearts and drunken eyes<br>
We're free to sentimentalise<br>
By corners where the martyrs fell.|salign = right|source= From Bax's poem "A Dublin Ballad", 1916.<ref>O'Byrne, p. 63</ref>}}
During his time in Dublin, Bax had made many republican friends. The Easter rising in April 1916 and the subsequent execution of the ringleaders shocked him deeply. He expressed his feelings in some of his music such as the orchestral ''In Memoriam'' and the "Elegiac Trio" for flute, viola, and harp (1916), as well as in his poetry.<ref name=dnb/>

In addition to his Irish influences, Bax also drew on a Nordic tradition, being inspired by the Norwegian poet [[Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson]] and Icelandic sagas. Bax's Symphonic Variations for Piano and Orchestra (1917) is seen by the [[musicologist]] [[Julian Herbage]] as the turning-point from the Celtic to the Nordic in Bax's oeuvre; Herbage views it as a further indication of the shift that ''Winter Legends'', composed thirteen years later, has a Nordic rather than a Celtic setting.<ref name=archive/>

During the war Bax began an affair with the pianist [[Harriet Cohen]], for whom he left his wife and children.{{refn|The affair was not publicly known, though it was common knowledge in musical circles; Vaughan Williams was greatly amused to find in a musical dictionary an entry for Harriet Cohen which read, "– see under Bax".<ref>Rothwell, p. 154</ref> Elsita Bax refused her husband a divorce, and remained his wife until her death in 1947.<ref name=p10>Parlett, p. 10</ref>|group= n}} Musically, she was his muse for the rest of his life; he wrote numerous pieces for her, and she was the dedicatee of eighteen of his works.<ref>Parlett, p. 321</ref>  He took a flat in [[Swiss Cottage]], London, where he lived until the start of the Second World War. He sketched many of his mature works there, often taking them in [[short score]] to his favoured rural retreats, [[Glencolmcille]] in [[Ulster]], Ireland, and then from 1928 onwards [[Morar]] in  Scotland, to work on the full score at leisure.<ref>Foreman and Foreman, p. 204</ref><ref>Scott-Sutherland, p. 142</ref>