Edward Elgar: national icon and perennial outsider - five online talks by Richard Wigmore

Elgar was born in the Worcestershire village of Broadheath in 1857, the son of a piano tuner and a farmer’s daughter with a taste for poetry and the arts. His humble origins would always rankle him, yet there were compensations in what he called ‘the rich stream of music that passed through my father’s establishment’. By his early teens Edward was determined to become a composer; and despite obstacles, he gradually built up a local reputation as a violinist, conductor and violin teacher. He also taught himself the bassoon. This talk explores Elgar’s youth and the music he composed up to 1890, from the so-called ‘shed music’ for his ad hoc wind quintet, via the tone poem ‘Sevillana’ and the Serenade for Strings, to the brilliantly coloured ‘Froissart’ Overture, his first major public success.

In 1889, still little known beyond his native Worcester, Elgar married his former piano pupil Caroline Alice Roberts, a major-general’s daughter. Alice’s unflinching support and encouragement would prove crucial to her hyper-sensitive husband, haunted by a sense of failure and fear of rejection. But his reputation grew steadily during the 1890s, through works such as the Serenade for Strings, and the choral cantatas King Olaf and Caractacus. Then, in June 1899, came the acclaimed London premiere of the ‘Enigma’ Variations: Elgar’s breakthrough work, and the coming-of-age of the English musical renaissance. A year later the premiere of his oratorio The Dream of Gerontius was a famous fiasco. Yet critics, and the wider public, were quick to recognise the music’s greatness. Soon the oratorio was being performed throughout Britain and in Germany. This talk will examine both the ‘Enigma’ Variations and Gerontius, of which Elgar wrote, ‘This is the best of me’.

A year after Gerontius, Elgar’s fame was sealed by the success of the Pomp and Circumstance marches, music forever associated with the boundless confidence of the Edwardian era. By now the composer was moving in glittering social circles. He had more commissions than he could cope with. In 1904 King Edward VII honoured him with a knighthood. Yet even in these years of triumph Elgar remained intensely vulnerable, often masking his sense of social inferiority with displays of boorishness. Musically this was the most prolific period of Elgar’s career, with masterpieces ranging from the bracing Introduction and Allegro for strings, through the two oratorios The Apostles and The Kingdom – far less well known than Gerontius but full of glorious music – to the First Symphony, whose Manchester premiere in December 1908 was the greatest triumph of Elgar’s life.

Buoyed by the First Symphony’s success, Elgar began another major work, the Violin Concerto. Of all the great violin concertos this is the most intimate and confessional, a passionate spiritual pilgrimage. A year after Fritz Kreisler gave the concerto’s triumphant premiere came the Second Symphony, whose opulence and optimism are tempered by what Elgar dubbed his ‘retrospective sadness’. His last major pre-War work, the tone poem Falstaff, conjures up the innocence of Elgar’s childhood in the hills around Worcester and Malvern. This talk focuses on these three orchestral masterpieces, plus the enchanting music for Algernon Blackwood’s children’s play The Starlight Express, premiered a year after the outbreak of the First World War. Elgar always had a genius for recreating the world of childhood. Here was a chance to escape from the appalling reality of the present into a never-never land where troubled adults are saved by children.

As the war dragged on Elgar’s habitual melancholy deepened into depression. He composed little, and was often ill. Among a smattering of war works, his sombre three choral songs ‘The Spirit of England’ rise far above patriotic tub-thumping. Only toward the end of the war did Elgar find peace, in an isolated cottage, in West Sussex. Here his creative juices revived with three chamber works: a Violin Sonata, a String Quartet and a Piano Quintet. Each is infused with an intense nostalgia. Even more so is the Cello Concerto of 1919, a requiem for a civilisation that had vanished forever. The concerto would prove to be Elgar’s last substantial work. Following the death of his wife, Elgar spent much of his time walking his dogs or attending the Worcester races. Then, in 1933, a year before his death, he began to plan a new symphony, commissioned by the BBC. Exactly how the symphony would have turned out we shall never know. But in the inspired completion of composer Anthony Payne it has a true Elgarian stamp. The Third Symphony concludes our exploration of a composer who rose from a modest provincial background to become a national icon.