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Like most children, Edward and his brothers and sisters engaged
in fantasy games, but theirs were more ambitious and purposeful
than most. At tender ages (Edward was eleven at the time), they
staged a play based on their fantasy world from which adults,
lacking an understanding and appreciation of children, were
banned. Elgar composed a few simple tunes to be played as
incidental music by an improvised band using whatever instruments
the Elgar children could lay their hands on. A few years later,
Elgar committed the tunes to one of his sketchbooks.
We do not know what sort of reception the play or its music
received but it clearly made a lasting impression on Elgar. Some
40 years later, having passed his fiftieth birthday, he dug out
his sketchbooks and set to work turning the incidental music into
these two charming suites. The pieces may be melodically and
structurally simple but the orchestration is delightful, far in
advance of what the youthful Elgar could have achieved with the
limited resources and skills then available to him. Curiously,
Elgar chose to disregard the chronology and gave the suites the opus
number 1, demonstrating to the world his wish that they should
be regarded as no more than a new arrangement of his earliest
surviving work.
The suites are infrequently performed as a whole but some of the
pieces, notably Wild Bears, have secured a separate reputation
as orchestral concert encores. Considerations underlying the
choice of an encore rarely lead to the selection of superlative
works and Wild Bears cannot be considered particularly
representative of the suites, while a short excerpt cannot convey
the structural balance and delicacy of the suites as a whole.
To gain a full appreciation of their enchantment, they must be
heard in their entirety.
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