Elgar

On the evening of Saturday the twenty-first of October 1898, in the upstairs drawing-room of Forli (the Elgar family home on the Alexandra Road in Malvern Wells, Worcestershire), Edward Elgar, forty-one years old, the Worcestershire-born violin teacher and small-organ-recital provincial composer of moderate national reputation, came home from a long day's teaching at Malvern Girls' College, sat down at the upright piano in the drawing-room, smoked a cigar (the daily relaxation routine of the late-Victorian provincial composer), and began to improvise. The improvisation became, by the musical-historical date, the foundational small theme of the Variations on an Original Theme, Op. 36, the Enigma Variations. Over the next eighteen weeks, by his own letters to A. J. Jaeger of Novello's, Elgar developed the theme into fourteen variations, each titled with the initials or nickname of a member of his circle of friends in Worcestershire and Hereford. Variation IX, Nimrod, written for the publisher's editor A. J. Jaeger (the German Jäger meaning hunter, the Old Testament Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord), has, by every careful judgment of the twentieth-century English-music critical reception, become the pre-eminent piece of English-orchestral elegy: it is the piece played at every state funeral in the United Kingdom since 1934, at every Remembrance Sunday service at the Cenotaph since 1920, and at the Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall every November. The premiere of the Variations was at the Saint James's Hall in London on the nineteenth of June 1899 under Hans Richter; the reception was the moment Elgar moved from provincial reputation to national-composer status.

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