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Elgar was born on 2nd June 1857 at Broadheath, a village some three miles
from the small city of Worcester in the English West Midlands. His father had a
music shop in Worcester and tuned pianos.
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The Elgar shop in the
centre of Worcester
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The young Elgar, therefore, had the great advantage of growing up in a thoroughly practical
musical atmosphere. He
studied the music available in his father's shop and taught himself to play a
wide variety of instruments. It is a remarkable fact that Elgar was very
largely self-taught as a composer - evidence of the strong determination behind
his original and unique genius. His long struggle to establish himself as a
pre-eminent composer of international repute was hard and often bitter. For
many years he had to contend with apathy, with the prejudices of the entrenched
musical establishment, with religious bigotry (he was a member of the Roman
Catholic minority in a Protestant majority England) and with a late Victorian
provincial society where class consciousness pervaded everything.
Throughout the 1880s and the 1890s his experience grew and his style matured
as he conducted and composed for local musical organisations. He also taught
the violin and played the organ at St. George's Roman Catholic Church in
Worcester.
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| Alice Elgar
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In 1889 he married one of his pupils, Caroline Alice Roberts, daughter of
the late Major- General Sir Henry Roberts who had enjoyed a distinguished career
with the British army in India. She married Edward in opposition to her aunts
and cousins (her mother had died in 1887) who considered that in marrying the
son of a mere tradesman, a music teacher without prospects, she was marrying
beneath herself. Nevertheless, Alice with determination and a dogged faith in
Edward's emerging genius, played a vital part in the development of Elgar's
career.
Slowly, and through such early works as Froissart
(1890), the Imperial March (1897) and the cantatas King
Olaf (1896) and Caractacus
(1898), his reputation began to spread beyond the area immediately
around his native Worcestershire. His first big success came with the
Variations on an Original Theme (Enigma) in
1899. Dedicated to "my friends pictured within", this work, which is
a masterpiece of form and orchestration, showed that Elgar, by that time, had
surpassed the other leading English composers of his day, both in technical
accomplishment and sheer force of musical personality.
After Sea Pictures, a song cycle for
contralto and orchestra (1899), came one of Elgar's greatest religious
compositions - The Dream of Gerontius
- based on Cardinal Newman's poem about a soul's journey through to its
judgement and beyond. Unfortunately, due to inadequate rehearsals, the first
performance at Birmingham in October 1900 of this complex and original work
proved to be a failure, but the majority of the critics recognised the work's
greatness. Fortunately, the composition was rescued from oblivion by a second
performance under Julius Buths at Dusseldorf in December 1901, and again at the
Lower Rhine Festival in Dusseldorf in May the following year. Following this
latter performance, Richard Strauss praised Elgar as the first English
progressive musician.
After the initial failure of the Dream of Gerontius in 1900, Elgar was
understandably depressed, but within a few days he had characteristically
started writing again - an ebullient concert overture - Cockaigne
(In London Town) which was successfully premiered in 1901. Confirming
this success, in the same year came the first two Pomp
and Circumstance Marches - the first in D major containing the famous
trio section that was later to becomeLand of Hope and Glory.
Elgar appreciated its worth; he had prophesied: "I've got a tune that will
knock 'em - knock 'em flat! … a tune like that comes once in a lifetime …"
Elgar had 'arrived'. An all-Elgar festival at Covent Garden was held in 1904,
which included an exuberant new overture, In the
South, written after a visit to Alassio in Italy. In July of that year,
Elgar was knighted by King Edward VII.
By this time, Elgar's works were being performed both in Europe and in the
USA In 1905, came the Introduction and Allegro for
Strings, a masterly essay in string writing dedicated to Professor
Sanford of Yale University. In 1906, Elgar was busy working on his great
oratorio, The Kingdom, the sequel to
The Apostles of 1903. These two works were
based on an intricate tapestry of linking leitmotives in the style of Wagner.
Elgar originally intended that there should be a cycle of three oratorios but
the third part of the trilogy was never completed.
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Elgar conducting in EMI's
Abbey Road No 1
studio
in 1931
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Elgar next began to concentrate on symphonic work. He had been planning a
symphony (originally around the character of General Gordon) as early as 1898.
Work began again in earnest during the winter of 1907-08, while he was staying
in Rome. The Symphony No. 1 in A flat was
first performed in Manchester in December 1908. It was dedicated to and
conducted by Hans Richter who said of it: "Gentlemen, let us now rehearse
the greatest symphony of modern times, written by the greatest modern composer -
and not only in this country". The work was received with tremendous
enthusiasm and there were a hundred performances of it in Britain and all over
Europe and in America, Australia and Russia, etc. in just over a year. August
Jaeger of Novellos (the music publishers) - Nimrod
of the Enigma Variations - believed that the symphony's slow movement was
comparable to those of Beethoven.
A Violin Concerto in B minor followed in
1910 and then, in 1911, another symphony. The violin concerto was dedicated to
Fritz Kreisler who gave the first performance. The score is headed with an
inscription in Spanish: "Aqui esta encerrada el alma de ….." ("Here
is enshrined the soul of …."). Some say that he was referring to
Alice Stuart-Wortley, daughter of the English Pre-Raphaelite painter Millais.
She was closely associated with Elgar and his music at this time. The concerto
is a difficult virtuoso piece similar in scale to the Brahms concerto but more
richly orchestrated. The slow movement has a particular beauty and the last
movement has a unique and magical feature - an accompanied cadenza where the
strings are instructed that the pizzicato tremolando should be thrummed with the
soft part of three fingers whilst the violin muses at length over ideas recalled
from the earlier movements.
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Elgar conducting at
Wembley
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The Symphony No. 2 in E flat, although by
no means as immediately successful as its predecessor, is nevertheless probably
Elgar's profoundest symphonic utterance. The score is prefaced by a quotation
from Shelley: "Rarely, rarely comest thou, Spirit of Delight",
suggesting that the work is not only about delight but also about the rarity of
its occurrence. Elgar dedicated the symphony to the memory of King Edward VII,
who had recently died but the composition is much more than an expression of
national mourning for a much loved monarch. Elgar admitted to his friends that
it symbolised everything that had happened to him between April 1909 and
February 1911, and its roots went back even further. He marked the score with
two place names - Venice & Tintagel. In fact the Larghetto, usually assumed
to be a funeral lament for the late King, begins with an idea inspired by the
Basilica of St. Mark in Venice, which Elgar had visited in 1909.
Between the period of the Second Symphony and the beginning of the First
World War in 1914, there appeared only two major works -
The Music Makers, an ode for contralto,
chorus and orchestra based on a poem by Arthur O'Shaughnessy (1912), and a
symphonic study based on Shakespeare's Falstaff
(1913). The Music Makers is a deeply personal work with many self quotations
from earlier works. It expresses the positive influence on society of the
creative artist but it also underlines his loneliness and vulnerability. Elgar
considered Falstaff to be amongst his very best works - a view shared by many
professional musicians - but after the personal outpourings of the great
oratorios, the symphonies and the violin concerto, Falstaff seemed relatively
detached and this probably explains its comparative neglect.
The First World War depressed Elgar deeply. Apart from a few patriotic
pieces, incidental music for a children's play entitled The Starlight
Express (1915), settings of three war poems by Laurence Binyon
The Spirit of England (1915-17), now
recognised as one of the composer's masterpieces, and the ballet The
Sanguine Fan (1917), nothing major emerged. It was not until 1918 and 1919
that his final great period produced the three chamber works - the Violin Sonata and the String
Quartet, both in E minor, the Piano Quintet
in A minor and theCello Concerto in E
minor,
his last great masterpiece. Audiences were quick to note the change - no longer
the pomp and swagger of earlier days.
Here was a new Elgar - less assured, more contemplative, more withdrawn.
Speaking of the Cello Concerto, Elgar's biographer Ian Parrott says: "It is
a work apart, by a lonely man in war-time who sees that artistic criteria have
altered irreversibly".
In 1920, Lady Elgar died and with her died much of Elgar's inspiration and
will to compose. She had organised his household and ministered to his
comforts. For a long time she saved him hours of drudgery, for instance by
ruling bar lines on score paper. She walked miles in all weathers to post
precious parcels of manuscript and proofs. In the early days of their marriage
she had collaborated with him to produce such works as Scenes from the
Bavarian Highlands (1896) - Elgar's settings of his wife's poems inspired by
holidays spent in Germany. At times when success seemed forever to be eluding
him, she never lost faith. In short, she had been the driving force behind his
genius encouraging him and proclaiming his talents at every opportunity.
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Elgar with Marco,
his spaniel dog
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Throughout the 1920s, Elgar, saddened by his bereavement and by the social
and musical changes brought about by the war, lived in virtual retirement,
outwardly content to live the life of a country gentleman in his beloved
Worcestershire with his dogs, sometimes emerging for the occasional visit to
London or for a conducting or recording assignment. (He made a fine series of
recordings of his own compositions for HMV). Honours continued to be conferred
on him: in 1928 he was created Knight Commander of the Victorian Order
(K.C.V.O). About this time, it seemed that he had taken on a new lease of life
for he began work on a number of large projects including an opera, The
Spanish Lady and a third symphony. In 1933 he flew to Paris to conduct his
violin concerto with the youthful Yehudi Menuhin, the soloist with whom he had
recorded the work in London some weeks earlier. Whilst in France, Elgar took
the opportunity of visiting Delius at Grez-sur-Loing. Both men had but one more
year to live. In October, Elgar was found to be suffering from a malignant
tumour which pressed on the sciatic nerve. Further composition became
impossible and he died on 23rd February, 1934.
© ELGAR SOCIETY 1979
"For thirty years after his death
in 1934, his music was considered to
be 'out of fashion'. It was said to epitomise the Edwardian era and to have no
relevance to a later age. I believe, however, that it is far too great to be
tied to one short period of history and that, in any case, it is music of so
personal a nature that it can be described accurately not as 'Edwardian' but
only as 'Elgarian'."
Michael Kennedy - 'Portrait of Elgar'
(Oxford University Press -1968)
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"… His greatest music was, and often is, regarded as
quintessentially English… But when this has been done, there is still the
paradox that appreciation of Elgar was shown in the first place by immigrants or
foreigners of singular discernment…"
"They (the Elgars) were proud to be English; they were often concerned
with the little as well as the large issues of national life; but they accepted
it as axiomatic that national sentiment was valueless unless it was linked to
the humane tradition of European thought …"
Dr. Percy M. Young - 'Elgar O.M.'
(Purnell Book Services - 1973 edition)
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Edward Elgar (2nd June 1857 - 23rd February 1934) - "Those years had
seen change accelerate as never before in human history. His response had been
to seek the illumination of time remembered. For all those of his generation
and the future who would feel the insight of retrospection, he had made of that
evanescence his music."
Jerrold Northrop Moore - 'Edward Elgar - A Creative Life'
(Oxford University Press - 1984)
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