"Around the time of composition was a Kandinsky Retrospective at the Royal Academy in London. Amongst the exhibits was a particularly striking, early oil painting entitled "Nacht", which looked more akin to the work of Cézanne or of the French impressionists and quite unlike those works of Kandinsky's later style. In this painting concentric circles spread outwards from a darkly morbid moon, like ever widening circular ripples on a pond. Against this seemed to be apparitions of dancing figures.
Visual stimuli play only a minor role in my works, yet the mysterious salubriousness of the painting captured the imagination. The vividly depicted circles found expression in a recurring "ground bass", underpinning a gradual crescendo in texture and intensity; the spectral dancers were alluded to in an irregular, agitato passage in 5/8. At the climax of the piece these two elements combine; the welter of sound is abruptly broken off, however, and it is in the subdued atmosphere of the opening that the work concludes."〔