Sir Edward Elgar(1857–1934)

Edward William Elgar was born on the second of June 1857 at The Firs, the small cottage at Broadheath three miles outside Worcester, fourth child of William Henry Elgar, a piano-tuner, organist and proprietor of the Elgar Brothers music shop at 10 High Street, Worcester, and Anne Greening of Weston in Herefordshire. The family moved into the High Street rooms above the music shop within a year of his birth, and the boy was raised in the shop. He left Littleton House School at fifteen and worked for a year in a Worcester solicitor's office before joining his father at the music shop in 1873 as junior partner. From fifteen to twenty-two he taught himself music in his father's shop, working systematically through the orchestral and chamber scores his father stocked, picking up the violin from a Worcester teacher, playing organ at St George's Catholic Church Worcester where his father was the parish organist, and writing the early manuscript pieces (the wind quintets for his Sunday-morning brothers' band) that became the apprenticeship of his composition.

He served as bandmaster of the Worcester County Lunatic Asylum at Powick from 1879 to 1884, a five-year practical apprenticeship in scoring for the small band of asylum staff that gave him his working orchestration technique. He married Caroline Alice Roberts in May 1889, a clergyman's daughter and an amateur poet, the move that took him out of the Worcester music shop into the working composer's life. The couple settled at Forli, the small villa in Malvern Link in the Malvern Hills, in 1891, and across the next decade Elgar built the body of mature work on which his world reputation rests.

The Variations on an Original Theme (Enigma), Op. 36, the orchestral set of fourteen variations and a finale on a hidden counter-melody (the enigma to which Elgar never disclosed the answer in his lifetime), was composed at Malvern in 1898 to 1899 and given the world premiere on the nineteenth of June 1899 at the St James's Hall in London under Hans Richter. The reception placed Elgar within a year at the centre of the English musical establishment; the Enigma Variations remain among the most-performed late-Romantic orchestral works in the world repertoire. The Dream of Gerontius, Op. 38, the great oratorio on Cardinal Newman's poem of the soul's journey after death, was composed in 1899 to 1900 and given the troubled premiere at the Birmingham Triennial Festival in October 1900 under Richter (the choir was under-rehearsed; the score had reached the conductor late). The German premiere at Düsseldorf under Julius Buths in December 1901, then the second Düsseldorf performance in May 1902 under Richard Strauss, established the work as the central English oratorio since Handel.

The first Pomp and Circumstance March, Op. 39 No. 1, in D major, was composed in 1901 and given its first performance at Liverpool on the nineteenth of October 1901 under Alfred Rodewald. King Edward the Seventh, hearing the trio section in the autumn of 1901, suggested to Elgar that it might carry a great song; A. C. Benson supplied the words, and the trio became at the coronation of June 1902 the Coronation Ode and finally, by 1902, the standalone choral song Land of Hope and Glory. The march has been the central ceremonial music of British state occasion ever since; the trio is the closing song of the Last Night of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall every year. He continued the orchestral output through the Cockaigne Overture (1901, the great London concert overture), the Introduction and Allegro for Strings (1905, the principal English-language work for string orchestra), the First Symphony in A flat (1908, the most-performed symphony in Britain in the year of its premiere with a hundred performances within twelve months), the Violin Concerto in B minor (1910, dedicated to Fritz Kreisler), the Second Symphony in E flat (1911), and the Cello Concerto in E minor (1919), the last great work of his major-orchestral output and one of the most-performed concertos in the cello repertoire.

He was knighted by Edward the Seventh in 1904, awarded the Order of Merit in 1911, created the first Baronet of Broadheath in 1931, made Master of the King's Music by George the Fifth in 1924, and elected to the Royal Society of Musicians and as honorary doctor of Oxford, Cambridge, Yale and Birmingham. He died at Marl Bank, Worcester, on the twenty-third of February 1934 in his seventy-seventh year, and was buried at St Wulstan's Catholic Church at Little Malvern beside his wife. The Enigma Variations, the Dream of Gerontius, the Cello Concerto in E minor, the Violin Concerto, the two symphonies and the Pomp and Circumstance Marches are in continuous performance worldwide; Land of Hope and Glory has remained the central ceremonial song of British state occasion for over a hundred and twenty years; the Cello Concerto in the Jacqueline du Pré recording of 1965 is one of the best-selling classical recordings in history. The Elgar Birthplace Museum at The Firs in Broadheath has been open to the public since 1936. The Elgar name in modern English music carries the weight of the Worcester piano-tuner's son who returned the English composing tradition to the front rank of European music.