Edward Elgar

Early Life

In Victorian-Edwardian England, Edward Elgar was something of an outsider, and a feeling of social inferiority dogged him throughout his life. He was born in Worcester in 1857, a Roman Catholic, the son of a lowly piano-tuner and music-shopkeeper. He left school at 16 to follow the precarious career of a freelance musician, teaching, arranging and playing in local orchestras until he was well into his thirties. When it came to musical technique – orchestration, harmony and counterpoint – he was self-taught. His music shows that he did a magnificent job of educating himself, but for the acutely self-critical Elgar this just fuelled his sense of insecurity.

Finding Success

Unsurprisingly, Elgar drew back from promoting himself, and yet he had a talent for befriending people who could help and encourage him. Fortunately, he met and married Alice Roberts, daughter of an Army general – this despite the family’s strong disapproval. Alice’s belief in Elgar was fiercely benign, and she made it her life’s work to nurture his genius. After trying (and failing) to make a career in London, the couple returned to Malvern, near Worcester, by the hills Elgar had loved since childhood. A lucky commission from the Worcester Festival (the Overture Froissart) brought him his first real success – he was 33.

Long-Awaited Genius

During the 1890s, Elgar produced some impressive large-scale choral works, and interest in him grew beyond Worcestershire. But it was with his purely orchestral ‘Enigma’ Variations, dedicated ‘to my friends pictured within’, that he really made his name. The conductor at the London premiere, Hans Richter (once Wagner’s right-hand man), became a determined champion, and Elgar’s reputation began to spread internationally. But it still wasn’t plain sailing. His choral-orchestral masterpiece The Dream of Gerontius was received poorly at its British premiere in 1901, and success only came with a performance the following year in Düsseldorf.

Later Years

Elgar’s Symphony No 1 was a sensation: the critics raved, Richter compared it to Beethoven, and within a year it had notched up nearly a hundred performances. But this did nothing to quell Elgar’s acute self-doubt, as the music that follows tends to confirm. Despite its bravura ending, the Violin Concerto is haunted by an acute sense of loss. The Second Symphony begins by invoking Shelley’s ‘Spirit of Delight’, but it culminates in a truly terrifying vision inspired by a passage in Tennyson’s poem Maud – one critic accused it of ‘pessimism and rebellion’. With the outbreak of World War I, Elgar turned increasingly inward, composing three chamber masterpieces: the String Quartet, Violin Sonata and the Piano Quintet. The remarkably intimate Cello Concerto that followed in 1919 overflows with glorious lyricism, but the mood is unmistakably elegiac. When Alice Elgar died in 1920, Elgar drew back from the musical world, composing very little during the next decade, and telling friends that he felt ‘disillusioned and old’, and ‘unwanted’. It wasn’t until well after World War II that an Elgar revival began in earnest.

Elgar learned a great deal from Richard Wagner, still considered a dangerous modernist by many in his day. From Wagner he learned the courage to tackle big forms and big issues. Johannes Brahms was also an important model: Brahms’ rich orchestral sound and mastery of classical forms was constantly before him when he tackled symphonies and concertos. But the composer he called ‘my ideal’ was the hyper-sensitive German romantic Robert Schumann. Elgar himself was prone to depression and worrying mood-swings, and Schumann showed him how to express the anxieties and complexities that troubled him throughout his life.