Elgar, Sir Edward William

Elgar, Sir Edward William (1857-1934), the first modern British composer to write important choral and orchestral music, and one of the major figures of European late Romanticism.

Elgar was born on June 2, 1857, at Lower Broadheath, near Worcester, in which city his father kept a music shop. As a young man he filled several musical posts, including County Band Instructor and musical instructor at the County Lunatic Asylum, before succeeding his father as organist of St George’s Roman Catholic Church, Worcester, in 1885. In 1889 he married Alice Roberts, daughter of a distinguished military family, and resigned his position to devote himself to composing. The Elgars then moved to London in search of publishers and performances, and in 1890 his overture Froissart, written in London but performed that year in Worcester, brought Elgar some recognition. Within a year, however, financial pressures forced them to return to Worcestershire, where they lived near Malvern, and Elgar taught violin.

He wrote a number of choral works during the 1890s, including the oratorio The Light of Life (sometimes known as Lux Christi, 1896) and the cantatas The Black Knight (1893) and Caractacus (1898). These were mainly performed at provincial choral festivals such as the Three Choirs Festival, but Elgar did not become well known nationally until 1899, when the Hungarian conductor Hans Richter performed his Variations on an Original Theme in London. That composition, better known as the Enigma Variations because the central theme is suggested but never overtly stated, is one of his most highly regarded and popular works. The Dream of Gerontius (1900), a setting of the poem of the same title by John Henry Newman, for three soloists, chorus, and orchestra, and generally considered Elgar’s masterpiece, firmly established the reputation of the composer in Britain.

While Gerontius achieved several performances abroad, being especially popular in Germany, Elgar’s international reputation was made by the Symphony no. 1 (1908), which achieved over 100 performances in its first year. The Violin Concerto for the pre-eminent soloist of the day, Fritz Kreisler, followed in 1910, and a year later came the complex Symphony no. 2, dedicated to the memory of King Edward VII but containing a sombre and majestic funeral march originally inspired by the death of a friend. Other important works include the oratorios The Apostles (1903) and The Kingdom (1906)—two parts of a projected trilogy on New Testament themes; the orchestral overtures Cockaigne (1901, a celebration of Edwardian London) and In the South (1904, a Strauss-like evocation of Italy); the Introduction and Allegro for strings (1905); the tone poem Falstaff (1913, described by the composer as a “symphonic study” of Shakespeare’s comic creation); and the five popular Pomp and Circumstance marches (1901-1907, 1930). In 1904 Elgar was knighted, and in 1911 he was made a member of the Order of Merit. In 1931, shortly before his death, he was made a Baronet.

The world of imperial optimism which Elgar seemed to many to encapsulate was shattered by World War I, however, and his popularity quickly waned; after 1919 he completed no significant new works. In 1920 he lost his wife Alice, who had been an indefatigable crusader for his work and who regularly overcame his self-doubt and spurred him to write. Elgar nevertheless began a number of projects he did not complete. At the time of his death on February 23, 1934, at Worcester, he was at work on a third symphony and an opera, The Spanish Lady (based on Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass). In the 1990s the sketches for the symphony were “elaborated” into a complete work by the composer Anthony Payne, even though in a fit of despair shortly before his death Elgar had asked that no one should be allowed to “tinker” with them. Payne’s version was premiered, to great acclaim, in 1998. A performance version of The Spanish Lady has also been made. Perhaps the most important legacy of Elgar’s last years, however, is a series of recordings he made of some of his major orchestral works, including a 1932 recording of the Violin Concerto with the young Yehudi Menuhin as soloist.

Elgar’s work is an example of late Romanticism showing the influence of Wagner and Brahms, Dvořák and Richard Strauss. Nevertheless, his mature work is always unmistakably in his own voice, in which deep emotion and even personal anguish and insecurity are overlaid by the vigorous, open-air brashness of Edwardian Britain, as they were in Elgar’s personality, which to the end of his life displayed the tensions between his humble origins and high social aspirations, and between his personal Catholicism and the largely Protestant world in which he lived. The emotion includes an element of nostalgia, which together with the Edwardian opulence contributed to the unfashionableness of Elgar’s music among younger composers after World War I. But Elgar was a genius of the orchestra, knowing exactly the capabilities of every instrument (he played many of them himself) and mixing his colours, particularly in the symphonies and the concertos, with the precision and boldness of a great painter.

His distinctive “Englishness” is strongly connected to his feeling for landscape, particularly that of his native Worcestershire. Elgar walked or bicycled long distances daily, and commented that “music is in the air, you just take as much of it as you need”. It is an irony that Elgar desperately coveted his large London house as a mark of the social status he achieved, but that the flow of musical inspiration seemed to dry up when he was away from his native countryside. His last great works were the product of time spent at a rented cottage, Brinkwells, near the West Sussex town of Fittleworth: they include the fine String Quartet (1918) and Piano Quintet (1919), and the Cello Concerto (1919), which has become in recent years perhaps his most popular work.