Sir Edward (William) Elgar
(b Broadheath, nr. Worcester, 2 June 1857; d
Worcester. 23 Feb 1934). English composer. He had violin lessons in Worcester and London
but was essentially self-taught, learning much in his father's music shop. From the age of
16 he worked locally as a violinist, organist, bassoonist, conductor and teacher, also
composing abundantly though not yet very individually: the accepted corpus of his works
belongs almost entirely to the period after his 40th birthday.
His first attempt to establish himself in London was
premature. He moved there with his wife Alice in 1889, but in 1891 thet returned to
Malvern, and he began to make a reputation more steadily with choral works: The Black
Knight, The Light of Life, King Olaf and Caratacus. These
were written within a specifically English tradition, but they were influenced also by
German music from Weber, Schumann and Mendelssohn to Brahms and Wagner. The orchestral
Enigma Variations (1899), in which each variation portrays a different friend of Elgar's,
then proclaimed the belated arrival of a fully formed original style, taken further in the
oratorio The Dream of Gerontius (1900), where the anxious chromatisicm of a post-Parsifal
manner is answered by the assurances of the Newman text: Elgar was himself a Roman
Catholic, which may have been one cause of his personal insecurity.
Gerontius and the Variations made him
internationally famous, but he remained in Worcestershire, composing mostly in the same
two genres: The Apostles and The Kingdom were two parts of a never
completed triptych of oratorios, and a sequence of short orchestral pieces was followed by
a long awaited and much acclaimed First Symphony, swiftly joined by the Violin Concerto
and Second Symphony. By 1912 the Elgars had at last settled in London, but after the
outbreak of war he acheived little besides the deeply reflective Cello Concerto, and after
his wife's death in 1920 almost nothing. In 1923 he went back to Worcester, and though he
occasionally worked at new pieces - a completion of the oratorio trilogy, a Third
Symphony, an opera after Jonson's The Devil is an Ass - his composing life was
over. He did, however, work energetically at recording much of his music for the
gramophone.
The celebrated nobility of his music has been seen as
evocative of British imperial glory, but its deeper qualities are of aspiration and
nostalgia: they are qualities of an intimately personal expression, but also of a style
created at the end of a tradition. For though the Straussian tone poem Falstaff is
one of his subtlest creations, most usually his symphonic forms looked back to Schumann
and, in point of thematic transformation, Franck. But his highly characteristic and often
extended melodic themes suggest a connection with Bruckner's in their tonal and rhythmic
stability (there is often an underlying slow march metre) and their implication of unusual
harmonic relationships.
Cantatas and oratorios: The Black Knight
(1892); The Light of Life (1896); Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf (1896); Caratacus
(1898); Sea Pictures, mezzo, orch (1898); The Dream of Gerontius (1900); The Apostles
(1902); The Kingdom (1906); The Music Makers (1912).
Orchestral Music: Froissart, ov. (1890);
Serenade, str (1892); Enigma Variations (1899); Cockaigne, ov. (1901); Pomp and
Circumstance, 5 marches (1901-30); In the South, ov. (1904); Introduction and Allegro, str
(1905); Wand of Youth, Suites nos. 1 and 2 (1907-8); Sym. no.1 (1908); Vn Conc. (1910);
Romance, bn, orch (1910); Sym. no.2 (1911); Falstaff, sym. poem (1913); Vc Conc. (1919);
Severn Suite, brass band (1930).
Chamber and instrumental music: Salut
d'amour, pf/vn, pf/etc (1889); Org sonata (1895); Chanson de nuit, Chanson de matin
(c.1897); Vn sonata (1918); Str.Qt (1918); Pf Qnt (1919); pf music.
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