Edward Elgar

Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet, OM, GCVO (/ˈɛlɡɑːr/ ⓘ;[1] 2 June 1857 – 23 February 1934) was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire.

[7] His friend and biographer W. H. "Billy" Reed wrote that Elgar's early surroundings had an influence that "permeated all his work and gave to his whole life that subtle but none the less true and sturdy English quality".

[8][n 3] He began composing at an early age; for a play written and acted by the Elgar children when he was about ten, he wrote music that forty years later he rearranged with only minor changes and orchestrated as the suites titled The Wand of Youth.

[14] After a few months, Elgar left the solicitor to embark on a musical career, giving piano and violin lessons and working occasionally in his father's shop.

[n 6] Throughout his life, Elgar was often inspired by close women friends; Helen Weaver was succeeded by Mary Lygon, Dora Penny, Julia Worthington, Alice Stuart Wortley and finally Vera Hockman, who enlivened his old age.

Elgar's biographer Michael Kennedy writes, "Alice's family was horrified by her intention to marry an unknown musician who worked in a shop and was a Roman Catholic.

[32] For example, an offer from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, to run through some of his works was withdrawn at the last second when Sir Arthur Sullivan arrived unannounced to rehearse some of his own music.

[3] For lack of other work, he was obliged to leave London in 1891 and return with his wife and child to Worcestershire, where he could earn a living conducting local musical ensembles and teaching.

The Black Knight (1892) and King Olaf (1896), both inspired by Longfellow, The Light of Life (1896) and Caractacus (1898) were all modestly successful, and he obtained a long-standing publisher in Novello and Co.[35] Other works of this decade included the Serenade for Strings (1892) and Three Bavarian Dances (1897).

Elgar was of enough consequence locally to recommend the young composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor to the Three Choirs Festival for a concert piece, which helped establish the younger man's career.

At the age of forty-two, Elgar produced the Enigma Variations, which were premiered in London under the baton of the eminent German conductor Hans Richter.

The publishers of the score recognised the potential of the vocal piece, "Land of Hope and Glory", and asked Benson and Elgar to make a further revision for publication as a separate song.

The Times commented, "Four or five years ago if any one had predicted that the Opera-house would be full from floor to ceiling for the performance of an oratorio by an English composer he would probably have been supposed to be out of his mind.

"[57] The king and queen attended the first concert, at which Richter conducted The Dream of Gerontius,[57] and returned the next evening for the second, the London premiere of The Apostles (first heard the previous year at the Birmingham Festival).

[78] In June 1911, as part of the celebrations surrounding the coronation of King George V, Elgar was appointed to the Order of Merit,[79] an honour limited to twenty-four holders at any time.

[3] Elgar's other compositions during the war included incidental music for a children's play, The Starlight Express (1915); a ballet, The Sanguine Fan (1917); and The Spirit of England (1915–17, to poems by Laurence Binyon), three choral settings very different in character from the romantic patriotism of his earlier years.

His daughter later wrote that Elgar inherited from his father a reluctance to "settle down to work on hand but could cheerfully spend hours over some perfectly unnecessary and entirely unremunerative undertaking", a trait that became stronger after Alice's death.

Almost nothing is recorded about Elgar's activities or the events that he encountered during the trip, which gave the novelist James Hamilton-Paterson considerable latitude when writing Gerontius, a fictional account of the journey.

[112] Fred Gaisberg of HMV, who produced Elgar's recordings, set up a series of sessions to capture on disc the composer's interpretations of his major orchestral works, including the Enigma Variations, Falstaff, the first and second symphonies, and the cello and violin concertos.

McVeagh makes the point that, because these works of the 1890s were for many years little known (and performances remain rare), the mastery of his first great success, the Enigma Variations, appeared to be a sudden transformation from mediocrity to genius, but in fact his orchestral skills had been building up throughout the decade.

The Violin Concerto, composed in 1909 as Elgar reached the height of his popularity, and written for the instrument dearest to his heart,[128] is lyrical throughout and rhapsodical and brilliant by turns.

Donald Tovey viewed it as "one of the immeasurably great things in music", with power "identical with Shakespeare's",[136] while Kennedy criticises the work for "too frequent reliance on sequences" and an over-idealised depiction of the female characters.

"[46] By contrast, the critic W. J. Turner, in the mid-twentieth century, wrote of Elgar's "Salvation Army symphonies,"[126] and Herbert von Karajan called the Enigma Variations "second-hand Brahms".

[2] Wood and younger conductors such as Boult, Sargent and Barbirolli championed Elgar's music, but in the recording catalogues and the concert programmes of the middle of the century his works were not well represented.

But if it is difficult to overlook the bombastic, the sentimental, and the trivial elements in his music, the effort to do so should nevertheless be made, for the sake of the many inspired pages, the power and eloquence and lofty pathos, of Elgar's best work. ...

Anyone who doubts the fact of Elgar's genius should take the first opportunity of hearing The Dream of Gerontius, which remains his masterpiece, as it is his largest and perhaps most deeply felt work; the symphonic study, Falstaff; the Introduction and Allegro for Strings; the Enigma Variations; and the Violoncello Concerto.

Cox noted that Elgar disliked folk-songs and never used them in his works, opting for an idiom that was essentially German, leavened by a lightness derived from French composers including Berlioz and Gounod.

"[160] The critic John Warrack wrote, "There are no sadder pages in symphonic literature than the close of the First Symphony's Adagio, as horn and trombones twice softly intone a phrase of utter grief",[161] whereas to Michael Kennedy, the movement is notable for its lack of anguished yearning and angst and is marked instead by a "benevolent tranquillity.

[180] David Rudkin's BBC television "Play for Today" Penda's Fen (1974)[181] deals with themes including sex and adolescence, spying, and snobbery, with Elgar's music, chiefly The Dream of Gerontius, as its background.

Elgar on the Journey to Hanley, a novel by Keith Alldritt (1979), tells of the composer's attachment to Dora Penny, later Mrs Powell, (depicted as "Dorabella" in the Enigma Variations).