Edward Elgar
“This is the best of me.” — Ruskin's words, which Elgar copied out at the end of the autograph score of The Dream of Gerontius
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Those close to him ⏳🌊
- FamilyAnn Elgar
His mother, a lover of poetry and history, nurtured the literary sensibility of her self-taught son; she died in 1902.
- InfluenceAntonín Dvořák
Playing the violin under his baton at the 1884 Worcester festival, Elgar awoke to the allure of orchestral color.
- FamilyCaroline Alice Elgar
His wife, eight years his senior, married him in defiance of her family and for 31 years sustained both the composer's household and his self-confidence.
- FriendshipAugust Jaeger
An editor at the publisher Novello, he was the friend who scolded and encouraged Elgar, and he lives on as ‘Nimrod’ in the 「Enigma Variations」.
- PatronageHans Richter
The conductor who premiered the 「Enigma Variations」 and the Symphony No. 1, he was the staunchest champion who brought Elgar to the European stage.
- FriendshipRichard Strauss
In Düsseldorf in 1902 he raised a toast to Elgar as ‘the first English progressivist,’ cementing his international reputation.
I. The music shop in Worcester · 1857–1879 (age 0–22)
(Birth) He was born in June 1857 in Lower Broadheath, a small village outside Worcester, England. His father, William Henry Elgar, was a piano tuner from Dover in Kent who ran a shop selling instruments and sheet music with his brother on Worcester's High Street and also served as organist at St George's Catholic Church. His mother, Ann, a farm laborer's daughter, converted to Catholicism after her marriage and loved reading poetry and history. Edward was the fourth of seven children. The family moved back into Worcester two years later, but all his life he regarded the cottage at Broadheath as the home of his heart. (Loss) Early death visited his childhood twice. In 1864 his eldest brother, Harry, died of scarlet fever, and in 1866 his younger brother Jo, who had shown an exceptional gift for music, died at the age of seven. Of the surviving siblings, Frank played the oboe and later took over the shop, while his youngest sister, Dot, became a nun and rose to be a mother superior. (Self-taught) He received almost no formal musical training. He read on his own the theory books and scores piled up in the shop and taught himself the violin and the organ. He left school at fifteen and worked briefly in a solicitor's office but soon turned back to music. He dreamed of studying in Leipzig, but the family's means would not allow it. Instead, he later recalled, around 1878 he learned form by writing a symphony of his own that followed exactly the bar counts and phrase layout of Mozart's Symphony No. 40. His background as a Catholic and a tradesman's son became the root of an inferiority complex that dogged him all his life in an English musical world dominated by the Established Church and the upper classes.
II. The asylum band and the major general's daughter · 1879–1891 (age 22–34)
(Powick) In 1879 the twenty-two-year-old Elgar became bandmaster at the county lunatic asylum in Powick, near Worcester. For the band, made up of staff members, he wrote quadrilles and polkas, earning a few shillings extra for each piece. He made his living by combining violin teaching, playing in local orchestras, and accompanying services on the church organ. At the 1884 Three Choirs Festival in Worcester he sat as a violinist in the orchestra while Dvořák conducted his own works, and wrote in a letter that the music was ‘simply ravishing.’ The orchestral color he absorbed then would later become his greatest weapon. (Broken engagement) That same year his engagement to Helen Weaver, who had been studying music in Leipzig, was broken off. She left for New Zealand the following year, and Elgar was deeply dejected for some time. (Alice) In 1886 he began teaching piano accompaniment to Caroline Alice Roberts. The daughter of the late Major-General Henry Roberts, she was eight years older than Elgar and wrote poetry and fiction. Her relatives frowned on a union across lines of class and religion, but the two were married in May 1889 at the Brompton Oratory in London. 「Salut d'Amour」, the short violin piece he wrote as an engagement present, was sold to the publisher for a pittance; it later became beloved around the world but brought him almost no income. (London) The newlyweds moved to London in search of opportunity. In August 1890 their only child, Carice, was born; her name was formed by contracting her mother's name, Caroline Alice. That same year the overture 「Froissart」 was performed at the Worcester festival, but the doors of London's musical world refused to open, and in the summer of 1891 the family retreated to Malvern.
A miniature written as an engagement present for Alice. Elgar gave it the German title ‘Liebesgruss’ (love's greeting), but the publisher Schott changed it to the French ‘Salut d'Amour’ so it would sell better.
- Over the piano's broken chords (arpeggios), which unfold the harmony one note at a time and set it rocking, the violin's opening melody, descending and rising again like a wave, is the face of the whole piece.
- It is in ternary form (A–B–A): the opening melody, a somewhat more buoyant middle section, and the return of the opening melody. It is worth listening for how much more tender the returning theme sounds than it did at first.
- With versions for violin, cello, solo piano and orchestra, it is an encore favorite. Heard in the cello's darker timbre, the same melody makes the confession sound all the more intimate.
- A performer's character shows in how long and how finely they draw out the final chord as it fades softly away.
III. The enigma of the Malvern Hills · 1891–1899 (age 34–42)
(Teaching) Settled at the foot of the Malvern Hills, Elgar once again supported the household by teaching the violin, work he loathed. Alice ruled the staves on her husband's manuscript paper and kept track of his schedule and correspondence, all but giving up her own writing. In 1892 the couple took a holiday in Bavaria and saw Wagner on stage at Bayreuth. A later holiday in Garmisch survived as the choral work 「From the Bavarian Highlands」 (1895), settings of poems Alice wrote in the style of Bavarian folk songs. (Cantatas) In the 1890s he wrote one cantata after another for provincial choral festivals. As 「The Black Knight」 (1893), 「King Olaf」 (1896) and 「Caractacus」 (1898) won acclaim from choirs across the English Midlands, he began to rise from local hopeful to a national name. August Jaeger, an editor at the London publisher Novello, was his closest friend and sternest critic in these years. Whenever Elgar sank into self-pity, the German-born Jaeger wrote to scold and encourage him. (Improvisation) In October 1898, after a day of teaching, Elgar idly picked out a melody at the piano, and Alice asked him to play the tune again. He tried varying it as this friend or that friend might have played it, and this became the starting point for fourteen variations. Each variation was headed with initials or a nickname pointing to his wife, his friends, or himself. Premiered in London the following June under Hans Richter, the work lifted a forty-two-year-old provincial musician at a stroke to the center of English music.
A piece that began as an improvisation at the piano and grew into portraits of his wife and friends. Elgar dedicated it ‘to my friends pictured within.’
- The theme is a lonely minor-key melody sung by the strings, marked by a rhythm that breaks off and pauses every two notes. Elgar said that ‘through and over the whole set another and larger theme goes, but is not played,’ leaving a riddle that has lasted more than a century.
- Variation IX, ‘Nimrod’, is a portrait of Jaeger. Because Jäger means ‘hunter’ in German, he was given the name of Nimrod, the hunter of the Bible. Beginning very softly and swelling to grandeur, this variation is a fixture at memorial ceremonies in Britain.
- Elgar himself revealed that Variation XI depicts his friend Sinclair's bulldog Dan tumbling down the bank of the River Wye, paddling out and barking. Listen for the low strings' figure slithering downward and the brass ‘bark.’
- In Variation X, ‘Dorabella’, the woodwinds imitate Dora Penny's slight stammer with finely broken-up figures.
- In Variation XIII, ‘***’, the clarinet quotes a phrase from Mendelssohn's overture 「Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage」, while the timpani, rolled with snare-drum sticks or coins, evoke the throb of a distant steamer's engines.
IV. Gerontius and the knighthood · 1900–1907 (age 43–50)
(Failure) In October 1900 the oratorio 「The Dream of Gerontius」 was premiered at the Birmingham Festival. A setting of Cardinal Newman's poem tracing the journey of a dying old man's soul to the judgment seat, it was the work in which Elgar revealed his Catholic faith most deeply. But the chorus master died suddenly, rehearsals fell into chaos, and the premiere ended in failure. Elgar wrote to Jaeger, ‘I have always said God is against art and I still believe it.’ (Germany) The reversal came from Germany. Julius Buths, a conductor in Düsseldorf, brought the work back to the stage in German translation, and after a performance at the 1902 Lower Rhine Music Festival Richard Strauss raised his glass to ‘the first English progressivist, Meister Edward Elgar.’ This welcome from the German musical world went on to change his standing even at home in England. (Marches) When the 「Pomp and Circumstance」 March No. 1 was played at a London Promenade Concert in 1901, the audience demanded two encores. 「Land of Hope and Glory」, which set words to the melody of its middle section (trio), was used in the 1902 Coronation Ode and became in effect a second national anthem. In September of that year his mother, Ann, died. (Knighthood) In March 1904 a three-day Elgar Festival was held at Covent Garden in London, and in July he was knighted. The family moved to Plas Gwyn, a large house in Hereford, where he set up a laboratory he named ‘The Ark’ in a small outbuilding in the garden and immersed himself in chemical experiments. From 1905 he held the professorship of music at the University of Birmingham, but when lectures sharply criticizing English musical life stirred controversy, he grew miserable with teaching and resigned in 1908. His father, William, died in 1906.
A confession of faith from Elgar the Catholic, the work went through both a disastrous premiere and a reappraisal in Germany. At the end of the autograph score he copied out Ruskin’s “This is the best of me.”
- At the end of Part One, the Priest (bass) gives the blessing in Latin, ‘Go forth, Christian soul (Proficiscere, anima Christiana),’ and the chorus and organ take it up in a mighty swell. The words come from the Catholic prayers for the dying.
- In Part Two, the Demons' Chorus spits out its mocking ‘Ha! Ha!’ in sharp rhythms. It is a passage where scorn is deliberately set down, raw, in the midst of a sacred work.
- At the moment the Soul at last beholds God, the score carries the instruction ‘for one moment must every instrument exert its fullest force.’ After that single, colossal blast, the tenor cries out, ‘Take me away.’
- The Angel's (mezzo-soprano) final farewell, ‘Softly and gently,’ is supported by a distant chorus so that it sounds like a lullaby.
The piece earned two encores at its London premiere, and its middle-section melody, reborn as “Land of Hope and Glory,” made Elgar a national composer.
- The title comes from a line in Act 3 of Shakespeare’s Othello: “Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war.” Curiously, the line is in fact Othello’s lament as he bids farewell to war.
- The opening bustles along, fast and boisterous. It sounds less like a stately procession than the crush of a festival.
- The melody of the middle section (trio) is first sung softly by the strings and horns, then repeated loudly by the full orchestra at the end of the piece. The heart of it is the contrast as the same tune swells from a whisper into a grand chorus.
- At the Last Night of the BBC Proms in Britain, the audience sings this melody together. In America, after it was played in 1905 when Yale University awarded Elgar an honorary doctorate, it spread as graduation music.
V. The symphony years · 1908–1913 (age 51–56)
(The symphony) Elgar had long contemplated a symphony but put it off until he was past fifty. Symphony No. 1, conducted by Richter in Manchester in December 1908, raised such expectations that Richter is said to have introduced it at rehearsal as “the greatest symphony of modern times, written by the greatest modern composer, and not only in this country,” and in a little over a year it was played nearly a hundred times. Elgar said that what he had put into it was “a massive hope in the future,” and he dedicated the work to Richter. (Loss) The following May, Jaeger died of tuberculosis at forty-eight. In May 1910, King Edward VII died. (Dedication) At the head of the score of the Violin Concerto, premiered by Fritz Kreisler in November 1910, Elgar wrote in Spanish “Herein is enshrined the soul of ……,” leaving the place for the name blank with dots. The likeliest candidate is usually said to be Alice Stuart-Wortley, daughter of the painter Millais, whom he called “Windflower” (anemone) and with whom he shared a special friendship, but Elgar never gave an answer. (Indifference) In May 1911, when Symphony No. 2, dedicated to the memory of the late king, was premiered, the response was lukewarm. Elgar complained to a friend that the audience “sat there like a lot of stuffed pigs.” That same year he received the Order of Merit, and in 1912 the family moved to Severn House, a large mansion in Hampstead, London. Its upkeep strained his income, and Elgar was forever worrying about money. The 1913 symphonic study “Falstaff” used Shakespeare’s aging knight to portray laughter and downfall together.
His first symphony, brought out when he was past fifty, was played nearly a hundred times in a little over a year and established him as the pioneer of the English symphony.
- The first movement opens quietly over a low tapping of timpani, with a motto theme marked “nobilmente e semplice (nobly and simply)” that moves like a march.
- No sooner has the motto ended than the music plunges into a rough, fast section in an entirely different key. This clash of serene hope and unease becomes the drama of the whole work.
- When the quick-note theme of the second movement slows down, on almost the same pitches, it becomes the song of the third-movement Adagio. Listen for the moment when the same tune, changing only its speed, turns into an entirely different emotion.
- At the end of the finale, the opening motto returns grandly in the full orchestra. This is the passage where Elgar’s “massive hope in the future” becomes sound itself.
Premiered by Kreisler, this is the work whose nameless dedication at the head of the score still leaves us asking “whose soul?”
- At the end of a long orchestral introduction, the solo violin enters quietly, as if taking up the tail of the preceding theme. Listen closely to that first phrase, which begins not with a flashy entrance but like a confession.
- The third-movement cadenza is usually where the soloist displays technique alone, but Elgar had the orchestral strings lay down a faint backdrop with a “pizzicato tremolando,” strumming the strings with several fingers as if trembling. Over it, the soloist recalls the themes of the earlier movements one by one.
- Lasting nearly fifty minutes, it is a long and difficult work that puts the performer’s stamina and concentration to the test.
- The 1932 recording made by the sixteen-year-old Menuhin under the composer’s baton is still held up as the benchmark for interpreting the work.
VI. War and the cottage in the woods · 1914–1920 (age 57–63)
(War) When the First World War broke out in 1914, Elgar sank into deep gloom. He had many friends in Germany and owed it a musical debt, and he loathed the mechanized slaughter. At fifty-seven he volunteered for the Hampstead special constabulary, and he wrote “Carillon,” a recitation for Belgium, and “The Spirit of England,” set to poems by Laurence Binyon. Its last movement, “For the Fallen,” was an elegy for the young dead. (The cottage) In 1917 Alice rented Brinkwells, a cottage in the woods near Fittleworth in Sussex. There, without the comforts of the city, Elgar felled trees and split firewood and regained his strength. In 1918 the Violin Sonata, the String Quartet and the Piano Quintet followed one after another. Alice wrote that she could hear the magic of the woods in this music. (The cello) In 1919 he completed his last major work, the Cello Concerto. In place of the opulent orchestra of his earlier works, a spare, restrained sonority prevails, and the piece is often heard as an elegy for a world the war had swept through. Its London premiere that October went ahead underprepared, because Albert Coates, another conductor on the same program, had eaten into the rehearsal time. Out of consideration for the soloist Felix Salmond, Elgar did not abandon the stage. (Farewell) In April 1920, Alice died. For thirty-one years she had put his scores in order, negotiated with publishers and shored up her husband’s wavering confidence. After that, Elgar completed almost no major works.
His last major work, written after he regained his strength in a woodland cottage near the end of the war, was premiered half a year before Alice died.
- At the very start, the cello, marked “nobilmente (nobly),” spits out chords forcefully, as if scraping them. It sounds less like song than a spoken soliloquy (recitative).
- The central melody of the first movement is sung alone first by the violas rather than the cello. Its rocking rhythm, dividing each bar into three groups of three (9/8 time), sounds like a lonely boat song.
- The third-movement Adagio spreads the orchestra very thin while the cello sings a single short song through to the end. It is a passage for catching your breath as you listen.
- Just before the end of the finale, the music suddenly slows, the third-movement melody and the opening soliloquy return, and then it ends briefly and decisively. The 1965 recording by Jacqueline du Pré and John Barbirolli made the work widely known.
VII. Old age before the gramophone · 1920–1934 (age 63–77)
(Homecoming) Left alone, Elgar sold Severn House and, after a spell in rented rooms in London, returned in 1923 to his native Worcestershire. In 1922 his daughter Carice married the farmer Samuel Blake, and later helped turn the birthplace at Broadheath into a museum. In 1923 Elgar traveled by ship up the Amazon as far as Manaus, and in 1924 he became Master of the King’s Music. In his last years he walked his dogs Marco and Mina and frequented the racecourse. (Recording) Interested early on in the gramophone, he conducted recordings of his own works from 1914 onward. In July 1932 he recorded the Violin Concerto with the sixteen-year-old Yehudi Menuhin. The following May he boarded an airplane for the first time in his life to perform the work with Menuhin in Paris, and on the way he visited the composer Frederick Delius, who lived at Grez-sur-Loing. (Unfinished) In 1932, through the good offices of his old friend George Bernard Shaw, the BBC commissioned a Symphony No. 3. But in the autumn of 1933 cancer was discovered during an operation. From his sickbed he is said to have shown the sketches to his friend the violinist W. H. Reed and asked that no one tinker with them. In January 1934 he followed a London studio recording of his own music over a telephone line run to his bedside. Said to have confided to his doctor that he did not believe in an afterlife, he died on February 23, 1934, at Marl Bank, his home in Worcester, aged seventy-six, and was buried beside Alice in the churchyard of St Wulstan’s in Little Malvern. In 1997 the composer Anthony Payne, with the consent of the Elgar estate, shaped the surviving sketches into a performing version.
Lesser-known stories
In July 1897, Elgar sent his twenty-three-year-old friend Dora Penny a note made up of 87 small semicircular symbols. This is the so-called “Dorabella Cipher.” Dora herself never managed to read it, and the note became known to the world only when she printed it in her 1937 memoir. Countless attempts at decipherment have followed, but no answer has yet been accepted as definitive. Elgar loved ciphers, puzzles and puns, and the title “Enigma” he gave his variations is of a piece with that taste. The same memoir also reveals that Elgar was an ardent fan of the football club Wolverhampton Wanderers. He even set a short melody to a line from an 1898 newspaper match report: “He banged the leather for goal.” It is a side of him hidden behind the image of the solemn composer of empire. Nor was his chemistry hobby from the Hereford years mere play. Through repeated experiments in his laboratory, “The Ark,” he obtained a patent in 1908 for a hydrogen sulfide generator. This earnest curiosity about natural science usually gets no more than a single line in musical biographies. The three asterisks of Variation 13 in the “Enigma Variations” officially refer to Lady Mary Lygon, who had set sail for Australia. But pointing to, among other things, the fact that her departure came later than the work’s composition, scholars have long put forward the view that it recalls Helen Weaver, his former fiancée who left for New Zealand in 1885. Elgar left no word on the matter, so there is no confirmation.
Notes on terms 📚🔎
Variations
(Word meaning) Byeonjugok (變奏曲) means a piece that is changed (變) as it is played (奏). (In music) A form in which a single theme is heard first and then played again several times, its tempo·rhythm·harmony·instrumentation·mood altered each time. The listener enjoys recognizing the original melody hidden within, even as its appearance changes. Imagine singing “Happy Birthday” once slowly and sadly, once fast like a rap, and once like a march. Elgar transformed the same theme into a different character for each friend, painting their portraits.
Oratorio
(Word meaning) The word comes from the Latin oratorium (prayer hall). The name took hold from the practice of telling Bible stories in song in the hall of a 16th-century Roman prayer society (the Oratorians). The Brompton Oratory in London, where Elgar was married, also takes its name from the same congregation. (In music) A large-scale work in which soloists, chorus and orchestra tell a religious story in song. Like an opera it has a plot and characters, but there are no sets, costumes or acting; the performers simply stand and sing. Think of a dramatic reading in a school auditorium, where a play script is brought to life by voices alone, without costumes. (Elsewhere) Besides “prayer room,” the English word oratory is commonly used to mean “the art of public speaking.”
Trio
(Meaning) Italian for 'three.' The name survives from the old custom, in the minuet, an early dance form, of playing the middle section modestly with just three instruments. (In music) Today, regardless of how many players are involved, it refers to the contrasting middle section tucked between the opening and closing parts of a march or dance. It is usually gentler and more songlike than what precedes it, and when it ends, the opening section returns. It is a bit like gym class: running hard, slowing to a walk midway to catch your breath, then running again. The famous melody of “Pomp and Circumstance” March No. 1 is exactly such a trio. (Elsewhere) In everyday speech, a trio is simply a threesome, three people who form a team.
Concerto
(Meaning) The Korean word hyeopjugok (協奏曲) means 'a piece played (奏) together (協).' The Latin root of the Western name, concerto, is concertare, which can also mean 'to contend,' so the name itself carries the sense of soloist and orchestra trading phrases as if in competition. (In music) A piece in which a single solo instrument, such as a violin or cello, steps out in front of the orchestra, sometimes blending with it and sometimes standing against it. It usually consists of three large sections (movements). Picture a soccer captain who stays in step with the whole team yet breaks away alone to score a goal.
Cadenza
(Meaning) The Italian cadenza comes from the Latin cadere ('to fall'). The name arose from the ornament once placed just before the closing passage (cadence) where the music 'settles down' toward its end. (In music) The passage in a concerto where the orchestra pauses and the soloist alone shows off their skill to the full. Originally performers often improvised it, but later composers increasingly wrote it out themselves. It is like the moment at a talent show when classmates stop accompanying and one person, center stage, displays their skill alone. Elgar deliberately left a faint orchestral accompaniment in this place, turning it into a time of remembrance rather than virtuosity. (Elsewhere) The English word cadence means the intonation or rhythm of speech, and in cycling it refers to the number of pedal revolutions per minute (cadence).
Nobilmente
(Meaning) Italian for 'nobly, with dignity.' (In music) A word written in the score (an expression mark) to tell performers in what spirit and manner to play. Elgar was so fond of it that it is regarded almost as his signature. It asks the player to go not too fast, to spread the sound generously, and to be stately, as if standing up straight, yet without swagger. Think of it as the calm, upright walk of a graduate whose name has just been called, crossing to the stage, translated into sound.
Motto
(Meaning) The Italian motto means 'a slogan, a short saying.' (In music) A short, distinctive theme that appears at the very beginning of a piece, announces the character of the whole work, and keeps returning across several movements. Each time it reappears, the listener feels that the long work is bound together as one. It is like a game's opening theme that comes back, slightly changed, at every key scene and rings out loudest when you defeat the final boss. Elgar's Symphony No. 1 ends with its opening motto returning in full force. (Elsewhere) In everyday life, a motto is a short saying one always keeps in mind, like a school's guiding principle or a personal creed.