Edward Elgar

Edward Elgar was born on 2 June 1857 at Lower Broadheath, a village near Worcester in the west of England. His father, William, a piano tuner and organist, ran a music shop in Worcester. Edward grew up surrounded by instruments and scores. He learned violin, piano, organ and bassoon, often on his own, studying the treatises and scores in the shop. A Catholic in a largely Anglican England, he long felt an outsider to polite society.

At fifteen he left school and worked briefly for a solicitor, then devoted himself to music. He could not afford to study at a conservatory and taught himself almost everything. He earned his living as a violinist, teacher and organist. From 1879 to 1884 he conducted the staff orchestra at the Powick lunatic asylum, composing quadrilles and polkas for it. He also played bassoon in a wind quintet with friends and composed for them.

In 1886 he took as a piano pupil Caroline Alice Roberts, a general’s daughter eight years his senior. They fell in love, and for their engagement in 1888 Elgar gave her Salut d’amour, a little piece that became very popular. Alice’s family disapproved of her marrying a penniless Catholic musician, but they married in 1889. Alice, a poet, believed deeply in his genius and supported him unfailingly; he later said he owed her everything.

For ten years Elgar composed cantatas for regional festivals but remained little known. Everything changed in 1899 with the Enigma Variations. One evening he improvised a theme at the piano and amused himself by varying it to imitate his friends’ personalities. Each variation is a musical portrait of someone close: his wife, his publisher August Jaeger in the famous “Nimrod”, or his friend George Sinclair, whose bulldog Dan falls into the river. The work made Elgar, at forty-two, the most famous composer in England. The mystery of the hidden theme, the “enigma”, has never been solved.

In 1900 he composed the oratorio The Dream of Gerontius, after a poem by Cardinal Newman; at first poorly performed, it then triumphed in Germany, where Richard Strauss hailed him as the first English progressive. In 1901 his march Pomp and Circumstance No. 1 was an extraordinary success; its trio, later sung to the words Land of Hope and Glory, became a kind of second British national anthem. In 1904 he was knighted by King Edward VII and became Sir Edward Elgar.

His Symphony No. 1, premiered in 1908, was performed more than a hundred times in a year around the world. The Violin Concerto (1910), premiered by Fritz Kreisler, and the Symphony No. 2 (1911) followed. The First World War filled him with sadness. In 1919 he composed his Cello Concerto, an elegiac and profound work. In 1920 the death of his wife Alice broke him; he composed almost no major works afterwards. In 1924 he was appointed Master of the King’s Music.

Elgar was very interested in new technologies such as chemistry, cinema and above all recording: he was one of the first composers to record his own works extensively. In 1932 he recorded his Violin Concerto with the sixteen-year-old prodigy Yehudi Menuhin. He died in Worcester on 23 February 1934, leaving unfinished a Third Symphony, completed in 1997 by the composer Anthony Payne. His portrait appeared on the twenty-pound sterling note.