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 Elga...(+)
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.
"Love" reflects the blend of craftsmanship and
inspiration that had placed Elgar at the summit of
Edwardian musical life: both qualities emerge in his
treatment of Maquarie’s line ‘Cease to be’,
repeated four times in the bass line and richly
decorated in the tenor part’s flowing melody..
Source: Hyperion
(https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dw.asp?dc=W12211_GB
LLH0914705).
Although originally composed for Mixed Chorus (SATB) &
Organ, I created this Arrangement of "Love" (Op. 18 No.
2) in F Major for String Quartet (2 Violins, Viola &
Cello).
