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Publishers survive by providing the public with works they wish to buy. And a struggling
composer, if he wishes his music to be published and therefore reach a wider audience, must write
what a publisher believes he can sell. Only having established a reputation can a composer write
larger scale works in a form of his own choosing with any realistic expectation of having them
performed.
During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the stock-in-trade for most publishers was the
sale of sheet music of short salon pieces for home performance. It was a form that was eventually
to bring Elgar considerably enhanced recognition and a degree of financial success with the
publication for solo piano of Salut d'Amour in 1888 and
of three hugely popular works first published in arrangements for piano and violin - Mot d'Amour (1889), Chanson de Nuit (1897) and Chanson de Matin (1899). Elgar composed short pieces
for solo piano sporadically throughout his life. But,
apart from the two Chansons, May Song (1901) and Offertoire (1902), an
arrangement of Sospiri and, of course, the Violin Sonata, all of Elgar's works for piano and violin
were composed between 1877, the dawning of his ambitions to become a serious composer, and
1891, the year after his first significant orchestral success with Froissart.
As with the works for solo piano, there is a certain similarity in most of the shorter works for
piano and violin, although Gavotte makes distinctive if somewhat quirky use of pizzicato
and, as it's marking of Andante Religioso suggests, Offertoire's broad,
stately melody places it closer to Chanson de Nuit
than to most of the other works reviewed here. But, despite their lack of depth and the inherent
simplicity, the works throughout display a level of craftsmanship that one expects from the mature
Elgar but is surprising in such early compositions. The mastery of form and structure, the pure,
skilful and often extended melodies, the harmonic inventiveness, the encapsulation of charm
without descending into sentimentality, make these pieces distinctively Elgar in miniature.
The dedications of the pieces also add to their interest, painting as clear a picture of Elgar's
social circle of the time as did the selection of friends portrayed in the Enigma Variations some 10-15 years later.
Reminiscences and Romance were both dedicated to
Oswain Granger, a fellow local amateur musician and a grocer by profession;
Pastourelle to Miss Hilda Fitton, sister of Isabel who became rather
better known as Ysobel of the Variations; and Virelai to Frank
Webb, another local musician and fellow member of the Worcester Amateur Instrumental
Society. The Allegretto on GEDGE was written for and dedicated to the Gedge sisters,
two of Elgar's pupils in Malvern; as with other composers before and after, Elgar based the piece
on the notes represented by their name. Bizarrerie was composed for, but not
dedicated to, another of Elgar's pupils, Fred Ward, who, to judge by the writing of the
piece, must have been a particularly skilled violinist. Two years later, Elgar dedicated La
Capricieuse to Ward, thereby rectifying the omission of the earlier piece.
Elgar dedicated Gavotte, arguably the least inspired of the pieces, to his long-
standing friend Dr Charles Buck of Settle, Yorkshire. The previous year, Buck had
encouraged his brother-in-law John Beare, a London-based music publisher, to publish
Une Idylle, the first work that Elgar had succeeded in having published. It was
possibly as a token of his gratitude to Buck that Elgar dedicated Gavotte to him. And
it is Une Idylle that carries the most intriguing dedication - to "Miss E E of
Inverness". All that is known about the young lady is that Elgar met her during a Scottish holiday
he took in 1884 and took a fancy to her. But her name, whether she ever knew of the dedication,
and whether Elgar would have struck up the temporary friendship had she not shared his initials
remains a matter of speculation.
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