 To meet the tight deadline of the production, Fauré reused some earlier music from incomplete works and enlisted the help of his pupil Charles Koechlin, who orchestrated the music.Fauré later constructed a four-movement suite from the original theatre music, orchestrating the concert version himself.The score was commissioned in 1898 by Mrs Patrick Campbell for the play's first production in English, in which she starred with Johnston Forbes-Robertson and John Martin Harvey.