1857–1934 · United Kingdom · 20th century
Edward Elgar (1857–1934) was a British Romantic composer from Worcestershire. He wrote the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, symphonies, concertos, oratorios and songs, and in 1924 became Master of the King's Musick. The site's catalogue has his piece There is Sweet Music, Op. 53, No. 1, at the level "Beginner+".
Edward Elgar was born on 2 June 1857 in Lower Broadheath, near Worcester. His father, William, tuned pianos and sold sheet music and instruments. His mother, Ann, had become a Catholic shortly before the birth, so the boy was baptised and raised in that faith. Edward was the fourth of seven children.
He grew up in his father's shop, surrounded by scores, instruments and textbooks, and worked out music theory for himself. His father played the organ at St George's church, and the boy often listened. From the age of eight he took piano and violin lessons; the violin gripped him more, and the first music he wrote was for that instrument. His mother cared about the arts and backed him, and from her he took a taste for literature and a love of nature. On warm summer days he carried manuscripts out of town to study them.
At fifteen Edward dreamed of studying in Leipzig and even started on German, but there was no money for the journey. He left school and found a place with a local solicitor, but the work did not suit him. Around that time he first played in public, as a violinist and organist. A few months later he quit the office for music, teaching piano and violin and helping out now and then at his father's shop.
Together with his father, Elgar took part in the Worcester men's choir, the Glee club: he accompanied, played the violin, composed, arranged and took up the baton for the first time. Adolf Pollitzer, with whom he briefly studied in London, thought he could become a leading soloist. But Elgar himself, after hearing virtuosos in London, decided that his violin lacked tone and gave up the idea of a solo career.
At twenty-two Elgar became bandmaster of the staff orchestra at the Worcester psychiatric hospital in Powick, an institution that believed in the healing power of music. He kept the job for five years, starting in 1879, and travelled there weekly. His years as a violinist in Worcestershire were in many ways his happiest. At the festivals in Worcester and in Birmingham he played in the violin section, and there he played Dvořák's Sixth Symphony and Stabat Mater, conducted by Dvořák himself. In a wind quintet he played the bassoon beside his brother Frank and made arrangements of Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn for the quintet.
Elgar's first journeys abroad took him to Paris in 1880 and to Leipzig in 1882. There he heard some excellent orchestras and got to know Wagner's music for the first time. In Leipzig a friend of his, Helen Weaver, was a conservatoire student. The two got engaged in summer 1883, but it was broken off the following year, which hit Elgar hard.
From 1882 Elgar played the violin for seven years in William Stockley's orchestra in Birmingham; on 13 December 1883 the orchestra played one of his first orchestral works, Sérénade mauresque. The author refused to conduct and stayed among the violinists. He often travelled to London trying to get his compositions published, but he stayed low in spirits and short of cash: in April 1884 he told a friend he had no money at all.
At twenty-nine, while teaching, Elgar met Caroline Alice Roberts, a writer eight years his senior whose father, Major-General Sir Henry Roberts, had died by then. Her family objected, but three years later, on 8 May 1889, they were married at the Brompton chapel. As an engagement gift Elgar gave her a short piece for violin and piano, Salut d'Amour, and she gave him a poem she had written in 1880, which he soon set to music.
Alice ran her husband's affairs and acted as his secretary, coped calmly with his changes of mood and criticised his music kindly. For the sake of his career she gave up part of her own plans. On her initiative the Elgars moved to London, nearer to the country's musical centre, and Elgar set about composing in earnest. On 14 August 1890 their daughter, Carice Irene, was born.
But London brought no success: tempting chances fell through, and an offer from Covent Garden to try out some of his works lapsed when Arthur Sullivan walked into the theatre without warning. His one significant commission was a piece for the 1890 Worcester Festival, Froissart, and in September Elgar himself conducted its first performance in Worcester. In 1891 the family returned to Worcestershire and settled in Great Malvern, where Elgar made a living by teaching and by conducting local groups. Life closer to nature and friends did him good.
In the 1890s Elgar slowly made a name with works for the big choral festivals of the Midlands. Caractacus (1898), The Light of Life (1896) and the two pieces drawn from Longfellow, The Black Knight (1892) and King Olaf (1896), did moderately well, and the firm of Novello became his regular publisher. Reviewers were courteous but not thrilled, money barely stretched, and in 1898 Elgar hoped to break through with something larger.
In 1899, aged forty-two, Elgar wrote the Enigma Variations, which Hans Richter conducted at their first performance, in London. Every variation is a portrait of one of the composer's friends, and Nimrod, probably the best known, portrays August Jaeger. The official title is Variations on an Original Theme, while the word Enigma sits above the first six bars. The puzzle is that, besides the fourteen variations, another theme, Elgar said, runs through the whole cycle without ever sounding, and he never named it.
Next came The Dream of Gerontius, for soloists, chorus and orchestra, set to a poem by John Henry Newman and written for the 1900 Birmingham Festival. Under Richter the first performance went badly because the chorus was ill prepared, yet critics saw the mastery of the work. Düsseldorf heard it in 1901 and once more in 1902, and later it travelled to Vienna, Paris and New York; before long British listeners warmed to it too. Its Catholic subject did not please everyone in the Anglican world: in 1901 the dean of Gloucester forbade it in his cathedral, and a year later the dean at Worcester would allow it only with cuts.
Probably the piece most associated with Elgar is the first of his five Pomp and Circumstance Marches, written between 1901 and 1930. At a London Promenade Concert in 1901, under Henry Wood, it had to be repeated twice. The singer Clara Butt convinced the composer that words could be set to the tune of the march's middle section; that is how the song Land of Hope and Glory came about. It went into the Coronation Ode of 1902 and is now regarded as an unofficial British anthem.
Covent Garden devoted three days in March 1904 to Elgar's music, a distinction that no English composer had known before. Buckingham Palace was where Elgar received his knighthood, on 5 July 1904, and in August the family relocated to Plâs Gwyn, a house on the edge of Hereford, where they stayed until 1911. In 1905–1908 he was music professor at Birmingham University; he accepted unwillingly and was glad to hand the post to Granville Bantock.
The First Symphony (1908), which Elgar had carried in his head for nearly ten years, was a triumph: only weeks after the premiere it was played in New York, Vienna, St Petersburg and Leipzig, and in a little over a year it reached a hundred performances. The Violin Concerto (1910), commissioned by Fritz Kreisler, was also a great success. The Second Symphony, first played in London in 1911, did not get such a reception, and the composer was disappointed. In June 1911 Elgar was awarded the Order of Merit.
During the First World War Elgar, though appalled at the coming losses, still felt patriotic: he enrolled as a special constable and wrote Carillon, a tribute to Belgium, and Polonia, a tribute to Poland. Later came The Spirit of England (1915–1917), settings of Laurence Binyon's verse, incidental music for a children's play, The Starlight Express (1915) and the ballet The Sanguine Fan (1917).
As the war drew to a close Elgar's health faltered, and his wife rented him a house, Brinkwells, in Sussex. There he recovered and in 1918–1919 wrote a violin sonata, a piano quintet, a string quartet and the Cello Concerto. The first three works were well received, but the premiere of the concerto in October 1919 went badly: another conductor had stretched his own rehearsal at Elgar's expense. A second London performance came only after more than a year.
On 7 April 1920, after a short illness, Alice died, aged seventy-two. In the 1920s Elgar's music went out of fashion, but its admirers kept playing it. In 1924 Elgar became Master of the King's Musick. He died on 23 February 1934 in Worcester. Sketches remained for a Third Symphony and a piano concerto (the concerto sketches date from 1913), and other composers developed them later.
Elgar's output includes orchestral works, oratorios, symphonies, chamber music, instrumental concertos and songs. Best known are the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, two symphonies, the violin and cello concertos and, among his choral works, The Dream of Gerontius. People often call him a typically English composer, yet most of what shaped his music came from the Continent, and among academics he was self-taught. His orchestral music, the Enigma Variations above all, is closely related to the Central European tradition of the time.
Elgar's music turns up in very different settings. The first Pomp and Circumstance March is traditionally played at the final concert of the BBC Proms, and in America its middle section is known as the graduation march. At the ceremony in London's Cenotaph remembering those killed in the two world wars, combined orchestras play Nimrod from the Enigma Variations. His works also include the suites The Wand of Youth and Salut d'Amour for violin and piano. After the composer's death his popularity sank for a generation and revived markedly only from the 1960s, with the aid of new recordings; he is still performed more in Britain than abroad.
The main landmarks are the First Symphony (1908), the Violin Concerto (1910) and the Second Symphony (1911). The first two works were immensely successful, while the Second Symphony and the Cello Concerto (1919) did not win the public at once and spent years making their way into the repertoire of British orchestras. In 1918–1919 Elgar also wrote chamber works: a violin sonata, a piano quintet and a string quartet. His later large religious choral works met with a warm welcome yet never joined the standard repertoire. For strings he wrote the Serenade (1892) and the Introduction and Allegro (1905), and before the war a choral ode, The Music Makers (1912), and a symphonic study, Falstaff (1913); both were received politely, without much enthusiasm.
Songs are among Elgar's genres, too. The site's catalogue currently holds one piece by him, There is Sweet Music, Op. 53, No. 1, at the level "Beginner+"; it is a way to begin getting to know this composer at the instrument. To hear his full orchestra, listen to the Enigma Variations or the first Pomp and Circumstance march.