English German French Documents letter Helge Rode Fritz Delius 14 September 1898 130-2 letter Jelka Rosen 5 January 1899 143-4 letter Ida Gerhardi 4 January 1900 166

Life's Dance is another work with a complex history of revisions and different versions, going through three versions, dated 1899, 1901, and 1912 respectively. Delius took some time to reach a definitive title, a process further complicated by the fact that performances took place in Britain and Germany, so it is variously referred to in letters and manuscripts as Lebenstanz, A Dance of Life, Ein Tanz des Lebens, Und Weiter geht der Tanz, Dansen Gaar, and La Ronde se déroule. The versions have prompted mixed cataloguing practices. Threlfall originally designated the first version, La ronde se déroule, as a separate work (unlike Lowe), but in the preface to vol. 24a of the Collected Edition he acknowledges this version as part of the continuous development of a single work (see RL, 69-73, RT, 136-9). Consequently here La ronde se déroule is considered a version of the work with a single DCW number. Indeed, the thematic material is substantively the same in all three versions, but its development is greatly extended in the second and third versions (the third version retains the orchestration of the second and many of the revisions, but Delius recomposed the final section).

The original version was inspired by the Danish drama Dansen Gaar (The Dance Goes On) by Helge Rode, and is headed by a quotation from this source. Jelka Delius, however, considered the final work to have become detached from this origin, quoting Delius as saying 'I wanted to depict the Turbulence, the joy, energy, great striving of youth - all to end at last in the inevitable death' (RL, 72).