 | Elgar, Edward - "My Love Dwelt in a Northern Land" in A Minor for String Quartet Op. 18 No. 3 String Quartet |
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| Composer : | Elgar, Edward (1857 - 1934) | ||||
| Instrumentation : | String Quartet2 other versions | ||||
| Style : | Classical | ||||
| Key : | A minor | ||||
| Arranger : Publisher : | MAGATAGAN, MICHAEL (1960 - ) | ||||
| Copyright : | Public Domain | ||||
| Added by magataganm, 26 May 2024 Sir Edward William Elgar (1857 – 1934) was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, concertos for violin and cello, and two symphonies. He also composed choral works, including The Dream of Gerontius, chamber music and songs. He was appointed Master of the King's Musick in 1924. Although Elgar is often regarded as a typically English composer, most of his musical influences were not from England but from continental Europe. He felt himself to be an outsider, not only musically, but socially. In musical circles dominated by academics, he was a self-taught composer; in Protestant Britain, his Roman Catholicism was regarded with suspicion in some quarters; and in the class-conscious society of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, he was acutely sensitive about his humble origins even after he achieved recognition. He nevertheless married the daughter of a senior British Army officer. She inspired him both musically and socially, but he struggled to achieve success until his forties, when after a series of moderately successful works his Enigma Variations (1899) became immediately popular in Britain and overseas. He followed the Variations with a choral work, The Dream of Gerontius (1900), based on a Roman Catholic text that caused some disquiet in the Anglican establishment in Britain, but it became, and has remained, a core repertory work in Britain and elsewhere. His later full-length religious choral works were well received but have not entered the regular repertory. Elgar began composing when still a child, and all his life he drew on his early sketchbooks for themes and inspiration. The habit of assembling his compositions, even large-scale ones, from scraps of themes jotted down randomly remained throughout his life. His early adult works included violin and piano pieces, music for the wind quintet in which he and his brother played between 1878 and 1881, and music of many types for the Powick Asylum band. Diana McVeagh in Grove's Dictionary finds many embryonic Elgarian touches in these pieces, but few of them are regularly played, except Salut d'Amour and (as arranged decades later into The Wand of Youth Suites) some of the childhood sketches. Elgar's sole work of note during his first spell in London in 1889–91, the overture Froissart, was a romantic-bravura piece, influenced by Mendelssohn and Wagner, but also showing further Elgarian characteristics. Orchestral works composed during the subsequent years in Worcestershire include the Serenade for Strings and Three Bavarian Dances. In this period and later, Elgar wrote songs and part songs. W. H. Reed expressed reservations about these pieces, but praised the part song The Snow, for female voices, and Sea Pictures, a cycle of five songs for contralto and orchestra which remains in the repertory. Elgar's principal large-scale early works were for chorus and orchestra for the Three Choirs and other festivals. These were The Black Knight, King Olaf, The Light of Life, The Banner of St George and Caractacus. He also wrote a Te Deum and Benedictus for the Hereford Festival. Of these, McVeagh comments favourably on his lavish orchestration and innovative use of leitmotifs, but less favourably on the qualities of his chosen texts and the patchiness of his inspiration. McVeagh makes the point that, because these works of the 1890s were for many years little known (and performances remain rare), the mastery of his first great success, the Enigma Variations, appeared to be a sudden transformation from mediocrity to genius, but in fact his orchestral skills had been building up throughout the decade. Elgar’s first published part-song dates from 1890 and marks the beginning of his association with the publishers Novello. It was a cautious and rather inauspicious start from their point of view; they offered no money to the composer, merely a hundred copies in lieu of copyright. When My Love Dwelt in a Northern Land first appeared, it was said to be ‘crude, ill-written for the voice, laid out without knowledge of the capabilities of the human voice &c &c!’, as Elgar told his friend Jaeger many years later. Yet it is a fine song, despite a conventional setting. In the third verse the melody is given to Soprano and Tenor I, while the other parts sing the words to a repetitive, rhythmic motif—an ‘accompaniment’ device Elgar later used in two of his greatest songs, Death on the Hills and Serenade. One might also note in passing that Lang’s poem has the theme—popular in Victorian times and frequently used by Elgar—of youthful love, often unfulfilled and/or brought to an end by premature death. Source: Hyperion (https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dw.asp?dc=W8245_GBA JY8727104). Although originally composed for Mixed Chorus (SATB) & Organ, I created this Arrangement of "My Love Dwelt in a Northern Land" (Op. 18 No. 3) in A Minor for String Quartet (2 Violins, Viola & Cello). Sheet central : | Three part-songs (5 sheet music) | | |||
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