, Worcestershire
Early years Edward Elgar was born in the small village of
Lower Broadheath, near
Worcester, England, on 2 June 1857. His father, William Henry Elgar (1821–1906), was raised in
Dover and had been apprenticed to a London music publisher. In 1841 William moved to Worcester, where he worked as a
piano tuner and set up a shop selling sheet music and musical instruments. In 1848 he married Ann Greening (1822–1902), daughter of a farm worker. Edward was the fourth of their seven children. Ann Elgar had converted to Roman Catholicism shortly before Edward's birth, and he was baptised and brought up as a Roman Catholic, to the disapproval of his father. William Elgar was a violinist of professional standard and held the post of organist of
St George's Roman Catholic Church, Worcester, from 1846 to 1885. At his instigation, masses by
Cherubini and
Hummel were first heard at the
Three Choirs Festival by the orchestra in which he played the violin. All the Elgar children received a musical upbringing. By the age of eight, Elgar was taking piano and violin lessons, and his father, who tuned the pianos at many grand houses in Worcestershire, would sometimes take him along, giving him the chance to display his skill to important local figures. His friend and biographer
W. H. "Billy" Reed wrote that Elgar's early surroundings had an influence that "permeated all his work and gave to his whole life that subtle but none the less true and sturdy English quality". He began composing at an early age; for a play written and acted by the Elgar children when he was about ten, he wrote music that forty years later he rearranged with only minor changes and orchestrated as the suites titled
The Wand of Youth. He worked through manuals of instruction on organ playing and read every book he could find on the theory of music. Elgar began to learn German, in the hope of going to the
Leipzig Conservatory for further musical studies, but his father could not afford to send him. Years later, a profile in
The Musical Times considered that his failure to get to Leipzig was fortunate for Elgar's musical development: "Thus the budding composer escaped the dogmatism of the schools." After a few months, Elgar left the solicitor to embark on a musical career, giving piano and violin lessons and working occasionally in his father's shop. but Elgar himself, having heard leading virtuosi at London concerts, felt his own violin playing lacked a full enough tone, and he abandoned his ambitions to be a soloist. Elgar coached the players and wrote and arranged their music, including
quadrilles and polkas, for the unusual combination of instruments.
The Musical Times wrote, "This practical experience proved to be of the greatest value to the young musician. ... He acquired a practical knowledge of the capabilities of these different instruments. ... He thereby got to know intimately the tone colour, the ins and outs of these and many other instruments." Elgar regularly played the bassoon in a wind quintet, alongside his brother Frank, an oboist (and conductor who ran his own wind band). In 1882, seeking more professional orchestral experience, Elgar was employed as a violinist in
Birmingham in
William Stockley's Orchestra, for whom he played every concert for the next seven years and where he later said he "learned all the music I know". On 13 December 1883 he took part with Stockley in a performance at
Birmingham Town Hall of one of his first works for full orchestra, the
Sérénade mauresque – the first time one of his compositions had been performed by a professional orchestra. Stockley had invited him to conduct the piece but later recalled "he declined, and, further, insisted upon playing in his place in the orchestra. The consequence was that he had to appear, fiddle in hand, to acknowledge the genuine and hearty applause of the audience." Elgar often went to London in an attempt to get his works published, but this period in his life found him frequently despondent and low on money. He wrote to a friend in April 1884, "My prospects are about as hopeless as ever ... I am not wanting in energy I think, so sometimes I conclude that 'tis want of ability. ... I have no money – not a cent."
Marriage When Elgar was 29, he took on a new pupil,
Caroline Alice Roberts, known as Alice, daughter of the late
Major-General Sir Henry Roberts, and published author of verse and prose fiction. Eight years older than Elgar, Alice became his wife three years later. Elgar's biographer
Michael Kennedy writes, "Alice's family was horrified by her intention to marry an unknown musician who worked in a shop and was a
Roman Catholic. She was disinherited." She did her best to gain him the attention of influential society, though with limited success. In time, he would learn to accept the honours given him, realising that they mattered more to her and her social class and recognising what she had given up to further his career. 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 his short violin-and-piano piece ''
Salut d'Amour'' to her. With Alice's encouragement, the Elgars moved to London to be closer to the centre of British musical life, and Elgar started devoting his time to composition. Their only child, Carice Irene, was born at their home in
West Kensington on 14 August 1890. Her name, revealed in Elgar's dedication of ''Salut d'Amour'', was a contraction of her mother's names Caroline and Alice. Elgar took full advantage of the opportunity to hear unfamiliar music. In the days before miniature scores and recordings were available, it was not easy for young composers to get to know new music. Elgar took every chance to do so at the
Crystal Palace Concerts. He and Alice attended day after day, hearing music by a wide range of composers. Among these were masters of
orchestration from whom he learned much, such as
Berlioz and Richard Wagner. Some tantalising opportunities seemed to be within reach but vanished unexpectedly. The result is described by
Diana McVeagh in the
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, as "his first major work, the assured and uninhibited
Froissart." Elgar conducted the first performance in Worcester in September 1890. Other works of this decade included the
Serenade for Strings (1892) and
Three Bavarian Dances (1897). Elgar was of enough consequence locally to recommend the young composer
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor to the Three Choirs Festival for a concert piece, which helped establish the younger man's career. Elgar was catching the attention of prominent critics, but their reviews were polite rather than enthusiastic. Although he was in demand as a festival composer, he was only just getting by financially and felt unappreciated. In 1898, he said he was "very sick at heart over music" and hoped to find a way to succeed with a larger work. His friend
August Jaeger tried to lift his spirits: "A day's attack of the blues ... will not drive away your desire, your necessity, which is to exercise those creative faculties which a kind providence has given you. Your time of universal recognition will come." , Elgar's publisher and friend, and "Nimrod" of the
Enigma Variations In 1899, that prediction suddenly came true. At the age of forty-two, Elgar produced the
Enigma Variations, which were premiered in London under the baton of the eminent German conductor
Hans Richter. In Elgar's own words, "I have sketched a set of Variations on an original theme. The Variations have amused me because I've labelled them with the nicknames of my particular friends ... that is to say I've written the variations each one to represent the mood of the 'party' (the person) ... and have written what I think they would have written – if they were asses enough to compose". He dedicated the work "To my friends pictured within". Probably the best known variation is "Nimrod", depicting Jaeger. Purely musical considerations led Elgar to omit variations depicting Arthur Sullivan and Hubert Parry, whose styles he tried but failed to incorporate in the variations. The large-scale work was received with general acclaim for its originality, charm and craftsmanship, and it established Elgar as the pre-eminent British composer of his generation. and remain to the present day a worldwide concert staple.
National and international fame , author of the text of
The Dream of Gerontius Elgar's biographer
Basil Maine commented, "When Sir Arthur Sullivan died in 1900 it became apparent to many that Elgar, although a composer of another build, was his true successor as first musician of the land." For the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival of 1900, he set Cardinal
John Henry Newman's poem
The Dream of Gerontius for soloists, chorus and orchestra. Richter conducted the premiere, which was marred by a poorly prepared chorus, which sang badly. Critics recognised the mastery of the piece despite the defects in performance. Richard Strauss, then widely viewed as the leading composer of his day, was so impressed that in Elgar's presence he proposed a toast to the success of "the first English progressive musician, Meister Elgar." and
The Dream of Gerontius soon became equally admired in Britain. According to Kennedy, "It is unquestionably the greatest British work in the oratorio form ... [it] opened a new chapter in the English choral tradition and liberated it from its Handelian preoccupation." The
dean of
Gloucester banned
Gerontius from his cathedral in 1901, and at Worcester the following year, the dean insisted on expurgations before allowing a performance. , first singer of Elgar's "Land of Hope and Glory" Elgar is probably best known for the first of the five
Pomp and Circumstance Marches, which were composed between 1901 and 1930. It is familiar to millions of television viewers all over the world every year who watch the
Last Night of the Proms, where it is traditionally performed. When the theme of the slower middle section (technically called the "
trio") of the first march came into his head, he told his friend Dora Penny, "I've got a tune that will knock 'em – will knock 'em flat". When the first march was played in 1901 at a London Promenade Concert, it was conducted by
Henry Wood, who later wrote that the audience "rose and yelled ... the one and only time in the history of the Promenade concerts that an orchestral item was accorded a double encore." To mark the
coronation of Edward VII and Alexandra, Elgar was commissioned to set
A. C. Benson's
Coronation Ode for a gala concert at the Royal Opera House on 30 June 1902. The approval of the
king was confirmed, and Elgar began work. The
contralto Clara Butt had persuaded him that the trio of the first
Pomp and Circumstance march could have words fitted to it, and Elgar invited Benson to do so. Elgar incorporated the new vocal version into the Ode. The publishers of the score recognised the potential of the vocal piece, "
Land of Hope and Glory", and asked Benson and Elgar to make a further revision for publication as a separate song. It was immensely popular and is now considered an unofficial British national anthem. In March 1904 a three-day festival of Elgar's works was presented at Covent Garden, an honour never before given to any English composer.
The Times commented, "Four or five years ago if any one had predicted that the Opera-house would be full from floor to ceiling for the performance of an oratorio by an English composer he would probably have been supposed to be out of his mind." The king and
queen attended the first concert, at which Richter conducted
The Dream of Gerontius, The final concert of the festival, conducted by Elgar, was primarily orchestral, apart for an excerpt from
Caractacus and the complete
Sea Pictures (sung by Clara Butt). The orchestral items were
Froissart, the
Enigma Variations,
Cockaigne, the first two (at that time the only two)
Pomp and Circumstance marches, and the premiere of a new orchestral work,
In the South, inspired by a holiday in Italy. , which housed the Faculty of Arts at the
University of Birmingham when Elgar was Peyton Professor of Music Elgar was
knighted at Buckingham Palace on 5 July 1904. The following month, he and his family moved to Plâs Gwyn, a large house on the outskirts of
Hereford, overlooking the
River Wye, where they lived until 1911. He was not at ease in the role, and his lectures caused controversy, with his attacks on the critics and on English music in general: "Vulgarity in the course of time may be refined. Vulgarity often goes with inventiveness ... but the commonplace mind can never be anything but commonplace. An Englishman will take you into a large room, beautifully proportioned, and will point out to you that it is white – all over white – and somebody will say, 'What exquisite taste'. You know in your own mind, in your own soul, that it is not taste at all, that it is the want of taste, that is mere evasion. English music is white, and evades everything." He regretted the controversy and was glad to hand on the post to his friend
Granville Bantock in 1908. His new life as a celebrity was a mixed blessing to the highly strung Elgar, as it interrupted his privacy, and he often was in ill-health. He complained to Jaeger in 1903, "My life is one continual giving up of little things which I love." Both
W. S. Gilbert and
Thomas Hardy sought to collaborate with Elgar in this decade. Elgar refused, but would have collaborated with
Bernard Shaw had Shaw been willing. Elgar paid three visits to the USA between 1905 and 1911. His first was to conduct his music and to accept a doctorate from
Yale University. As Elgar approached his fiftieth birthday, he began work on his first symphony, a project that had been in his mind in various forms for nearly ten years. His
First Symphony (1908) was a national and international triumph. Within weeks of the premiere it was performed in New York under
Walter Damrosch, Vienna under
Ferdinand Löwe, St Petersburg under
Alexander Siloti, and Leipzig under
Arthur Nikisch. There were performances in Rome, Chicago, Boston, Toronto and fifteen British towns and cities. In just over a year, it received a hundred performances in Britain, America and continental Europe. , dedicatee of Elgar's Violin Concerto The
Violin Concerto (1910) was commissioned by
Fritz Kreisler, one of the leading international violinists of the time. Elgar wrote it during the summer of 1910, with occasional help from W. H. Reed, the leader of the
London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), who helped the composer with advice on technical points. Elgar and Reed formed a firm friendship, which lasted for the rest of Elgar's life. Reed's biography,
Elgar As I Knew Him (1936), records many details of Elgar's methods of composition. The work was presented by the
Royal Philharmonic Society, with Kreisler and the LSO, conducted by the composer. Reed recalled, "the Concerto proved to be a complete triumph, the concert a brilliant and unforgettable occasion." So great was the impact of the concerto that Kreisler's rival
Eugène Ysaÿe spent much time with Elgar going through the work. There was great disappointment when contractual difficulties prevented Ysaÿe from playing it in London. Elgar asked Reed, "What is the matter with them, Billy? They sit there like a lot of stuffed pigs." an honour limited to twenty-four holders at any time. The following year, the Elgars moved back to London, to a large house in
Netherhall Gardens,
Hampstead, designed by
Norman Shaw. There Elgar composed his last two large-scale works of the pre-war era, the choral ode,
The Music Makers (for the Birmingham Festival, 1912) and the symphonic study
Falstaff (for the Leeds Festival, 1913). Both were received politely but without enthusiasm. Even the dedicatee of
Falstaff, the conductor
Landon Ronald, confessed privately that he could not "make head or tail of the piece", while the musical scholar
Percy Scholes wrote of
Falstaff that it was a "great work" but, "so far as public appreciation goes, a comparative failure". When World War I broke out, Elgar was horrified at the prospect of the carnage, but his patriotic feelings were nonetheless aroused. He composed "A Song for Soldiers", which he later withdrew. He signed up as a special constable in the local police and later joined the Hampstead Volunteer Reserve of the army. He composed patriotic works,
Carillon, a recitation for speaker and orchestra in honour of Belgium, and
Polonia, an orchestral piece in honour of Poland. "Land of Hope and Glory", already popular, became still more so, and Elgar wished in vain to have new, less nationalistic, words sung to the tune. Elgar conducted a recording of the work for the
Gramophone Company. Towards the end of the war, Elgar was in poor health. His wife thought it best for him to move to the countryside, and she rented "Brinkwells", a house near
Fittleworth in Sussex, from the painter
Rex Vicat Cole. There Elgar recovered his strength and, in 1918 and 1919, he produced four large-scale works. The first three of these were
chamber pieces: the
Violin Sonata in E minor, the
Piano Quintet in A minor, and the
String Quartet in E minor. On hearing the work in progress, Alice Elgar wrote in her diary, "E. writing wonderful new music". All three works were well received.
The Times wrote, "Elgar's sonata contains much that we have heard before in other forms, but as we do not at all want him to change and be somebody else, that is as it should be." The quartet and quintet were premiered at the
Wigmore Hall on 21 May 1919.
The Manchester Guardian wrote, "This quartet, with its tremendous climaxes, curious refinements of dance-rhythms, and its perfect symmetry, and the quintet, more lyrical and passionate, are as perfect examples of chamber music as the great oratorios were of their type." By contrast, the remaining work, the
Cello Concerto in E minor, had a disastrous premiere, at the opening concert of the LSO's 1919–20 season in October 1919. Apart from the Elgar work, which the composer conducted, the rest of the programme was conducted by
Albert Coates, who overran his rehearsal time at the expense of Elgar's. Lady Elgar wrote, "that brutal selfish ill-mannered bounder ... that brute Coates went on rehearsing." The critic of
The Observer,
Ernest Newman, wrote, "There have been rumours about during the week of inadequate rehearsal. Whatever the explanation, the sad fact remains that never, in all probability, has so great an orchestra made so lamentable an exhibition of itself. ... The work itself is lovely stuff, very simple – that pregnant simplicity that has come upon Elgar's music in the last couple of years – but with a profound wisdom and beauty underlying its simplicity." Elgar attached no blame to his soloist,
Felix Salmond, who played the work for him again later. In contrast with the First Symphony and its hundred performances in just over a year, the Cello Concerto did not have a second performance in London for more than a year.
Last years Although in the 1920s Elgar's music was no longer in fashion, Alice Elgar wrote with enthusiasm about the reception of the symphony, but this was one of the last times she heard Elgar's music played in public. After a short illness, she died of lung cancer on 7 April 1920, at the age of seventy-two. Elgar was devastated by the loss of his wife. For much of the rest of his life, Elgar indulged himself in his several hobbies. He even patented the "Elgar Sulphuretted Hydrogen Apparatus" in 1908. He enjoyed
football, supporting
Wolverhampton Wanderers F.C., for whom he composed an anthem,
"He Banged the Leather for Goal", and in his later years he frequently attended horseraces. His protégés, the conductor
Malcolm Sargent and violinist
Yehudi Menuhin, both recalled rehearsals with Elgar at which he swiftly satisfied himself that all was well and then went off to the races. In his younger days, Elgar had been an enthusiastic cyclist, buying
Royal Sunbeam bicycles for himself and his wife in 1903 (he named his "Mr.
Phoebus"). As an elderly widower, he enjoyed being driven about the countryside by his chauffeur. After Alice's death, Elgar sold the Hampstead house, and after living for a short time in a flat in
St James's in the heart of London, he moved back to Worcestershire, to the village of
Kempsey, where he lived from 1923 to 1927. He did not wholly abandon composition in these years. He made large-scale symphonic arrangements of works by
Bach and
Handel and wrote his
Empire March and eight songs
Pageant of Empire for the 1924
British Empire Exhibition. Shortly after these were published, he was appointed
Master of the King's Musick on 13 May 1924, following the death of
Sir Walter Parratt. From 1926 onwards, Elgar made a series of recordings of his own works. Described by the music writer Robert Philip as "the first composer to take the gramophone seriously", he had already recorded much of his music by the early acoustic-recording process for
His Master's Voice (HMV) from 1914 onwards, but the introduction of electrical microphones in 1925 transformed the gramophone from a novelty into a realistic medium for reproducing orchestral and choral music. In November 1931, Elgar was filmed by
Pathé for a newsreel depicting a recording session of
Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 at the opening of EMI's
Abbey Road Studios in London. It is believed to be the only surviving sound film of Elgar, who makes a brief remark before conducting the LSO, asking the musicians to "play this tune as though you've never heard it before." A memorial plaque to Elgar at Abbey Road was unveiled on 24 June 1993. A late piece of Elgar's, the
Nursery Suite, was an early example of a studio premiere: its first performance was in the Abbey Road studios. For this work, dedicated to the wife and daughters of the
Duke of York, Elgar once again drew on his youthful sketch-books. He flew to Paris in 1933 to conduct the Violin Concerto for Menuhin. While in France, he visited his fellow composer
Frederick Delius at his house at
Grez-sur-Loing. He began work on an opera,
The Spanish Lady, and accepted a commission from the
BBC to compose a
Third Symphony. His final illness prevented their completion. He fretted about the unfinished works. He asked Reed to ensure that nobody would "tinker" with the sketches and attempt a completion of the symphony, but at other times he said, "If I can't complete the Third Symphony, somebody will complete it – or write a better one." After Elgar's death,
Percy M. Young, in co-operation with the BBC and Elgar's daughter Carice, produced a version of
The Spanish Lady, which was issued on CD. The Third Symphony sketches were elaborated by the composer
Anthony Payne into a complete score in 1997. Elgar died on 23 February 1934 at the age of seventy-six and was buried next to his wife at
St Wulstan's Roman Catholic Church in
Little Malvern. ==Music==