Edward Elgar

British composer

• Born: June 2, 1857
• Birthplace: Broadheath, Worcester, England
• Died: February 23, 1934
• Place of death: Worcester, England

Mostly self-taught, Elgar slowly matured into an artist who expressed powerful emotions in music of strong, “masculine” British character. He was one of the last great Romantic composers.

Early Life

Edward Elgar (EHL-gahr) was one of seven children born into a middle-class Roman Catholic family. His father, William, was a piano tuner with some musical pretensions, some talent, and a bit of luck; he received an opportunity to tune the piano of a member of the royal household and thereafter did a good business. William Elgar often performed in local concerts and recitals as organist and violinist, and the boy’s first musical experiences thus revolved around his father, listening to him play and watching him conduct the village band. To this influence can be attributed Edward Elgar’s long association with the provincial musical world and his long, slow progress as a musician and composer, unknown for many years outside Worcester.

Elgar was a solitary, pensive child who held an abiding love for nature, especially the Malvern hills of his youth. He read widely a habit picked up from his mother and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of his favorite poets. (Later, he was to set some music to texts by Longfellow.) At fifteen he left school and within a year was working in his father’s music shop reading the scores of the classics and music textbooks.

By 1873, Elgar had already made an appearance as violinist in a village concert and was a regular performer in the Worcester Glee Club in which his father was a member. The club met in a coffeehouse atmosphere and performed works of Baroque and classical composers. Thus, Elgar learned his craft largely by listening and performing rather than by formal study.

By the late 1870’s Elgar was then in his early twenties he was writing numerous arrangements of classical themes for the varied social and cultural events of Worcester. He was a “utility” composer, adapting known works for salons and cotillions.

For the next fifteen years Elgar supported himself by teaching, playing the violin in the county orchestra, and producing arrangements and parlor songs. All during this long, slow period of tentative musical creation, Elgar was learning, experimenting. Much of his own original work during this period was stillborn chamber music and overtures started with brimming enthusiasm and left unfinished.

Though these years were among the most frustrating of Elgar’s life, they were crucial in the formation of his musical career. From playing and studying the works of Robert Schumann and Antonín Dvořák, especially, Elgar gained a keen insight into the subtleties of orchestration, gradually coming to recognize the technique of assimilating a popular, native musical idiom into a serious classical format. Amid the bulk of his unfinished compositions of this period were themes, phrases, and melodies that would be reworked into the great compositions of the late 1890’s and 1900’s.

The late 1880’s were the turning point of his career. Almost thirty, he had written little of real merit and was virtually unknown beyond Worcester County, some 120 miles from London. His most important post had been as conductor of the orchestra composed of musicians employed by the county lunatic asylum at Powick, and he was relying more and more on his practice as a violin and piano teacher. Then he met Caroline Alice Roberts. She came to him as a pupil and soon became the catalyst to his invention, the pivotal force in his creative life. Nearly forty, unmarried and high-mannered, Alice was intelligent, sensitive, well-read, and deeply committed to what she perceived as Elgar’s genius. They were married in 1889, the climax of Elgar’s long apprenticeship.

Life’s Work

Publishers in London were now beginning to accept Elgar’s short pieces, songs, and salon works such as Salut d’Amour (1889-1890), but his first major work to receive serious attention was his concert overture, Froissart (op. 19; 1890), noted for its rich orchestral effects and melodic themes. His first work conceived purely for orchestra, the overture is often thematically underdeveloped and repetitive, and the influence of Dvořák is obvious.

After a brief time in London, the Elgars moved back to Worcester, where Elgar produced work for “the provinces” while burning to contribute masterworks to British music. Though encouraged by Alice, he was often moody and dispirited. Frustrated by critical apathy and unsure of himself, he saw the musical establishment promoting the works of mediocre composers, such as Sir Frederic Cowen and Sir Hubert Parry, who seemed to churn out so easily the kind of self-conscious pomp the musical public prized.

Such work was in keeping, in fact, with Victorian earnestness big, serious, grave music that reflected and advanced the image of Empire. The works most popular were oratorios and cantatas, large-scale choral compositions in the heavy “Wagnerian” style so congenial to Victorian tastes.

It was thus with an eye to gain serious critical attention, together with a natural ability to write for the human voice, that Elgar was prompted to compose a number of choral works. It was, indeed, his oratorios and cantatas that gained for him his reputation.

The Black Knight (1893), based on a poem by Longfellow, was followed by The Light of Life (1896) and Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf (1896), also based on a Longfellow text. All were first performed at the Worcester festivals, important provincial showcases. Though they were marred by lame librettos, these works already showed a level of orchestral technique new to British music.

Caractacus was the first cantata in the Elgarian manner. Published in 1898 and dedicated to Queen Victoria, the work dramatizes musically the story of Caractacus, king of Britain, driven westward by the Roman legions, seeking help from the Druids, and finally being defeated but pardoned for his bravery. The story was a perfect vehicle for the expression of British patriotism and the magnanimity of Empire, but the music was the impressive element. The rich orchestration made Caractacus among the finest cantatas of the period, though the best was yet to come.

Despite these successes, Elgar was still dissatisfied. His letters of the period show him to have been frustrated with the continuing failure of the British musical establishment to understand what he was trying to do. Even on the verge of international fame, three years later, he was still writing to August Jaeger, his editor and confidant, that he could not make a living from his works and that even God was somehow against him. This peevishness of the letters and Elgar’s basically introverted personality contrasted ironically with his physical stature: He was tall, with a straight, dignified bearing, a large, regal forehead, dark eyes, and a stately mustache.

Yet peevish or not, Elgar continued to compose, and in the middle of all this work “on demand” by the local societies and music festivals he produced the first of his masterpieces. It was the summer of 1899 and he was, as usual, enjoying the privacy of his gardens and his closest friends when the idea struck him to compose a piece that would depict these friends in musical terms. Beginning with a theme, itself an “enigma,” the music would evolve into fourteen variations, each portraying one of his dearest friends. Thus, Variations on an Original Theme (“Enigma”) , op. 36, was born.

For many years, the popular title of the composition, “The Enigma Variations,” set the tone for the mystery, the puzzlement that surrounded the identities of the subjects. It is now known that Alice is represented by Variation no. 2, and Elgar himself by the last, no. 14, but though the identities of these “friends pictured within” are now clear, the importance of the work is independent of biography. Its brilliant orchestration, its shifting moods, its unerring unity, make the Variations on an Original Theme one of the greatest works of absolute music by an English composer. Indeed, the quality of the variations so impressed the British musical public that Cambridge University bestowed on Elgar an honorary doctorate, the first of many awards he was to receive over the next few years, including a knighthood in 1904.

At the turn of the century, Elgar brought out The Dream of Gerontius , an oratorio based on the poem by John Henry Newman. It was his most ambitious composition to date. The musical ideas had been in Elgar’s mind for years. The story of Gerontius, an ordinary man on the verge of death and personal judgment, was the perfect text to reflect the spiritual stress and eventual triumph that mirrored Elgar’s own career. The Dream of Gerontius is the first masterpiece by an Englishman in which the orchestra completely meshes with the vocal parts, both becoming expressions of deep religious feeling and conviction. The first part, especially, achieved levels of intimacy and expressiveness unmatched in British music.

Though the first performance of The Dream of Gerontius (1900) was a failure, it became a rousing success in Germany the following year and Elgar soon acquired an international fame and was considered by some the equal of Johannes Brahms. Elgar was not only England’s foremost composer but also one of music’s masters. At the summit of his creative life, Elgar composed what seemed to be series of spontaneous works; in fact, however, this period of solid achievement must be seen as the natural reward of his long, frustrating apprenticeship. The false starts of the 1880’s had prepared the way for the finished products of the mature years from 1900 to about the beginning of World War I.

After the ambitious and complex The Dream of Gerontius, Elgar produced its emotional opposite, the festive and buoyant Cockaigne Overture (“In London Town,” op. 40; 1901). The music was a tonic for Elgar, his spirits brimming with confidence for the first time in his career. The music is a sound picture of London its brassiness, its vibrancy, its confidence. Quickly after Cockaigne Overture came the imaginatively titled Pomp and Circumstance marches (1900-1930), the first of which has become a world classic, played at thousands of graduation ceremonies. The melody was later used as part of a coronation ode for Edward VII, “Land of Hope and Glory” (1902).

Another brilliant concert overture, In the South (1904), reflected the sunny skies of Italy and is filled with what Elgar himself described as “energy and life.” The product of his first of several sojourns in Italy in the winter of 1903-1904, the overture is really a tone poem that brilliantly evokes the Italian landscape, particularly in the scoring for clarinet and viola.

By now Elgar was honored throughout the musical world. Feted by the king, conducting his work in the three-day Elgar Festival in London, and becoming the first professor of an endowed chair of music at Birmingham University, Elgar was at the summit of his life’s work. As he approached fifty, expectations arose that he would compose a symphony, the culmination of his orchestral art. That symphony, no. 1 in A-flat Major, op. 55, appeared in 1908. The critical acclaim was immediate, some comparing the first slow movement to the great works of Ludwig van Beethoven. Time has tempered such praise, but the symphony is still regarded as music of robust power and melodic invention. It is, properly, England’s first great symphony.

Small-scale vocal and instrumental pieces continued to come from his pen throughout the decade, but in 1910, the year of King Edward’s death, Elgar brought out two of his last major works the Violin Concerto in B Minor, op. 61, and Symphony no. 2 in E-flat Major, op. 63. Both are masterpieces of Romantic music: intimately expressive, somber, rich in orchestral tone and color. Both works bear the distinctive characteristics of the Elgar manner nobility and dignity.

The Elgars were living in London in 1912, and in that year the composer wrote still another concert overture. As if to counterbalance the somber dignity of the symphonies, Falstaff (1913) sparkles with gaiety and wit. Elgar himself declared the music to be his favorite work. Though brilliant, Falstaff is also a peculiarly “studied” work, lacking the spontaneous expressiveness of his best music.

With the war years (1914-1918), Elgar who viewed the conflict with almost hysterical fear turned to the writing of choral work and incidental music for the theater, including a ballet score. His best work, however, was done.

Alice took ill during the winter of 1919 and died in April, 1920. With her death much of Elgar’s creativity declined. His most significant achievement during these last years was the steady phonographic recording of his works, resulting in one of the finest available documentations of composer/conductor recordings. Elgar died peacefully in February, 1934, and is buried next to Alice in the little country church in the Malvern hills.

Significance

Among the great composers, Elgar achieved his success by working within his limitations. His was a sensitive, poetic imagination, easily influenced by landscape and overwhelming emotions. His long apprenticeship suggests a musical personality unsure of its idiom, but the masterpieces of the early 1900’s show a clarity and a force unmatched in British music of the period. His work bears the stamp of Schumann, Dvořák, and Brahms, yet its dignified nobility is distinctively British in character. The secret of Elgar’s music is its personal intimacy, its direct appeal to the emotions, and its ability to use the orchestra to convey those moods and feelings common to all people.

Bibliography

Elgar, Sir Edward William. Letters to Nimrod. Edited by Percy M. Young. London: Dennis Dobson, 1965. Young has collected all the letters Elgar wrote to his friend August Jaeger from 1897 to 1908, the period of the composer’s greatest achievement. Impressive scholarship. Indispensable as a source of Elgar material.

Grimley, Daniel M., and Julian Rushton, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Elgar. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Essays exploring Elgar’s career, musical achievements, and the reception, performance, and interpretation of his work.

Kennedy, Michael. The Life of Elgar. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Kennedy uses Elgar’s correspondence and other new material to compile a comprehensive biography of the composer.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Portrait of Elgar. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Not a detailed biography, but one that attempts to shed light on the complexities of Elgar’s personality and its relationship to his music. Many Elgar letters are here published for the first time.

Moore, Jerrold Northrop. Elgar: Child of Dreams. London: Faber, 2004. Moore traces Elgar’s creative life and the influences on his music, particularly the English landscape, which was the inspiration for much of his work.

Newman, Ernest. Elgar. 1906. Reprint. New York: Brentano’s, 1977. A brief account written by a friend at the height of the composer’s career. Largely uncritical and exuberant, but interesting as a contemporary view.

Porte, John Fielder. Sir Edward Elgar. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970. Largely intended for the student of music, the study contains analytical and descriptive notes on Elgar’s complete works, including unnumbered pieces. A thorough, technical account.

Reed, W. H. Elgar as I Knew Him. London: Gollancz, 1936. The first study of Elgar after his death, this account is interesting for its anecdotes by and about Elgar from a contemporary musician. Much insight into Elgar’s music and working methods.

Young, Percy. Elgar, O. M.: A Study of a Musician. New York: Greenwood Press, 1980. A reprint of the 1973 London edition, this is commonly accepted as the definitive biography of the composer. A detailed and exhaustive study.