Edward Elgar

• 1. Introduction

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  Edward Elgar told a friend that he had a tune that would "knock 'em - will knock 'em flat." The tune became the trio of his first Pomp and Circumstance March. When it was played at a London Promenade Concert in 1901, the audience rose and yelled, demanding a double encore, the only time in the history of those concerts that an orchestral item won such a response. Yet the man who wrote it spent most of his life feeling like an outsider. He was a self-taught composer in circles ruled by academics. He was a Roman Catholic in Protestant Britain. He was acutely sensitive about his humble origins, even after recognition arrived. How did a piano tuner's son from a small Worcestershire village become the pre-eminent British composer of his generation? Why did a man so often called typically English draw nearly all his musical influences from continental Europe? And why did his stock fall so low for a generation after his death, only to revive decades later?

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• 2. The Self-Taught Outsider

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  William Henry Elgar set up a shop in Worcester selling sheet music and instruments, and worked as a piano tuner. His son Edward, born in the village of Lower Broadheath on the 2nd of June 1857, learned music not in a conservatory but in the cathedral, from books borrowed from the music library when he was eight, nine or ten. His mother, Ann, had converted to Roman Catholicism shortly before his birth, and Edward was baptised and raised in that faith, to his father's disapproval. He worked through manuals on organ playing and read every book on music theory he could find, later saying he had been most helped by Hubert Parry's articles in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Elgar hoped to study at the Leipzig Conservatory, but his father could not afford to send him. A profile in The Musical Times later judged this fortunate, writing that "thus the budding composer escaped the dogmatism of the schools." On leaving school in 1872, he went not to Leipzig but to a local solicitor's office as a clerk. He found office life uncongenial, and after a few months he left to make a musical career. At twenty-two he took the post of conductor of the attendants' band at the Worcester and County Lunatic Asylum in Powick, three miles from Worcester. The band was an odd mixture of piccolo, flute, clarinet, cornets, euphonium, strings and piano. He coached the players, wrote and arranged their music, and held the post for five years from 1879. The Musical Times wrote that this practical experience proved "of the greatest value to the young musician," teaching him intimately the tone colour and the ins and outs of many instruments.

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• 3. The Woman Who Believed

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  Caroline Alice Roberts, daughter of the late Major-General Sir Henry Roberts, became Elgar's pupil when he was twenty-nine. She was a published author of verse and prose fiction, eight years older than him, and her family was horrified at her intention to marry an unknown musician who worked in a shop and was a Roman Catholic. She was disinherited. They married on the 8th of May 1889, at Brompton Oratory. From then until her death, Alice acted as his business manager and social secretary, dealt with his mood swings, and served as a perceptive musical critic. In her diary she wrote, "The care of a genius is enough of a life work for any woman." As an engagement present, Elgar dedicated the short violin-and-piano piece Salut d'Amour to her. Their only child, Carice Irene, was born in West Kensington on the 14th of August 1890, her name a contraction of her mother's names Caroline and Alice. When Alice died of lung cancer on the 7th of April 1920, at the age of seventy-two, Elgar was devastated. Deprived of her constant support, he allowed himself to be deflected from composition for much of the rest of his life.

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• 4. Sudden Fame At Forty-Two

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  August Jaeger, Elgar's friend, once tried to lift his spirits during a low period, writing, "Your time of universal recognition will come." In 1899, at the age of forty-two, that prediction came true with the Enigma Variations, premiered in London under the German conductor Hans Richter. Elgar described labelling the variations with the nicknames of his particular friends, each written to represent the mood of a person, dedicating the work "To my friends pictured within." The best known variation, "Nimrod," depicts Jaeger. The work carries a genuine puzzle. Though there are fourteen variations on the original theme, Elgar said another overarching theme, never identified, "runs through and over the whole set" but is never heard. The Variations established Elgar as the pre-eminent British composer of his generation, and were well received in Germany and Italy. His next major work, The Dream of Gerontius, set Cardinal John Henry Newman's poem for the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival of 1900. Its premiere was marred by a poorly prepared chorus that sang badly, yet critics recognised its mastery. Richard Strauss, then widely viewed as the leading composer of his day, was so impressed that he proposed a toast to "the first English progressive musician, Meister Elgar." Some in the Anglican establishment disagreed with the Catholic text. Charles Villiers Stanford complained that the work "stinks of incense," and the dean of Gloucester banned it from his cathedral in 1901.

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• 5. Honours And Their Burden

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  Buckingham Palace was where Elgar was knighted on the 5th of July 1904. In March that year, a three-day festival of his works had been presented at Covent Garden, an honour never before given to any English composer. The Times remarked that a few years earlier, anyone predicting a full opera house for an oratorio by an English composer "would probably have been supposed to be out of his mind." In June 1911 he was appointed to the Order of Merit, an honour limited to twenty-four holders at any time. Between 1900 and 1931 he received honorary degrees from universities including Cambridge, Oxford, Yale and Aberdeen, and in 1931 he was created a Baronet of Broadheath. Yet celebrity sat uneasily on the highly strung composer. He complained to Jaeger in 1903, "My life is one continual giving up of little things which I love." Between 1905 and 1908 he held the post of Peyton Professor of Music at the University of Birmingham, which he had accepted reluctantly, feeling a composer should not head a school of music. His lectures caused controversy, attacking critics and English music, which he likened to a room painted all over white, evading everything. He was glad to hand the post to his friend Granville Bantock in 1908. He learned to accept honours in part because they mattered more to Alice and her social class, recognising what she had given up to further his career.

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• 6. The Symphonist And His Reversals

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  Walter Damrosch in New York, Ferdinand Lowe in Vienna, Alexander Siloti in St Petersburg and Arthur Nikisch in Leipzig all conducted Elgar's First Symphony within weeks of its 1908 premiere. In just over a year it received a hundred performances across Britain, America and continental Europe. The Violin Concerto of 1910 was commissioned by Fritz Kreisler, one of the leading violinists of the time, with technical advice from W. H. Reed, leader of the London Symphony Orchestra, who became a lifelong friend. Reed called its premiere "a complete triumph." It was Elgar's last popular triumph. His Second Symphony, presented the following year, ends quietly and contemplatively rather than in a blaze of orchestral splendour, and disappointed him at its reception. Reed recalled that the audience sat without that unmistakable note of being thoroughly roused, and Elgar asked him, "What is the matter with them, Billy? They sit there like a lot of stuffed pigs." The Cello Concerto in E minor suffered a disastrous premiere in October 1919, when the conductor Albert Coates overran his rehearsal time at Elgar's expense. The critic Ernest Newman wrote that never had so great an orchestra made so lamentable an exhibition of itself, though he praised the work itself as "lovely stuff, very simple." Lady Elgar privately raged at "that brute Coates." Unlike the First Symphony with its hundred performances, the Cello Concerto did not have a second London performance for more than a year.

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• 7. Chemistry, Football And The Amazon

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  Wolverhampton Wanderers F.C. had a supporter in Edward Elgar, who composed an anthem for them titled "He Banged the Leather for Goal." After Alice's death he indulged in his several hobbies, a reluctance to settle to work that he said he inherited from his father. Throughout his life he was a keen amateur chemist, sometimes using a laboratory in his back garden, and he invented the "Elgar Sulphuretted Hydrogen Apparatus," for which he decided to seek a patent. His proteges, the conductor Malcolm Sargent and violinist Yehudi Menuhin, both recalled rehearsals at which Elgar swiftly satisfied himself that all was well, then went off to the races. In his younger days he had been an enthusiastic cyclist, buying Royal Sunbeam bicycles in 1903 and naming his "Mr. Phoebus." In November and December 1923, he voyaged to Brazil, journeying up the Amazon to Manaus, where he was impressed by the opera house, the Teatro Amazonas. Almost nothing is recorded of his activities on the trip, which gave the novelist James Hamilton-Paterson latitude when writing Gerontius, a fictional account of the journey. Elgar took the gramophone seriously as no composer had before. From 1926 he made a series of recordings of his own works for His Master's Voice, the electrical microphone introduced in 1925 having transformed the gramophone into a realistic medium. He was appointed Master of the King's Musick on the 13th of May 1924. In November 1931 he was filmed by Pathe at the opening of EMI's Abbey Road Studios, asking the musicians to "play this tune as though you've never heard it before."

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• 8. Fall And Revival

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  "I believe there is nothing but complete oblivion," Elgar told his doctor, Arthur Thomson, having no faith in an afterlife. Inoperable colorectal cancer was discovered during an operation on the 8th of October 1933, and he died on the 23rd of February 1934 at the age of seventy-six, buried next to his wife at St Wulstan's Roman Catholic Church in Little Malvern. His music was identified in the public mind with the Edwardian era, and after the First World War he no longer seemed a progressive composer. In the early 1920s even the First Symphony had only one London performance in more than three years. The music scholar Edward J. Dent had identified four features that gave offence to the academic and snobbish section of English opinion, calling Elgar's style "too emotional," "not quite free from vulgarity," "pompous," and "too deliberately noble in expression." His stock remained low for a generation, beginning to revive significantly in the 1960s, helped by new recordings. The critic David Cox in 1967 considered the question of Elgar's supposed Englishness, noting that he disliked folk-songs and never used them, choosing an idiom essentially German leavened by French lightness. Cox found the answer in Elgar's own personality, which could make alien idioms a vital form of expression that was his alone. Sibelius called him "the personification of the true English character in music." Elgar fretted over works left unfinished at his death, asking Reed to ensure that nobody would "tinker" with the sketches of his Third Symphony. Yet he also said, "If I can't complete the Third Symphony, somebody will complete it - or write a better one." The composer Anthony Payne elaborated those sketches into a complete score in 1997, first performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Andrew Davis on the 15th of February 1998.

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