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 he is often r...(+)
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 he is often regarded as a typically
English composer, most of his musical influences were
not from England but from continental Europe.
Elgar was contemptuous of folk music and had little
interest in or respect for the early English composers,
calling William Byrd and his contemporaries "museum
pieces". Of later English composers, he regarded
Purcell as the greatest, and he said that he had
learned much of his own technique from studying Hubert
Parry's writings. The continental composers who most
influenced Elgar were Handel, Dvo?ák and, to some
degree, Brahms. In Elgar's chromaticism, the influence
of Wagner is apparent, but Elgar's individual style of
orchestration owes much to the clarity of
nineteenth-century French composers, Berlioz, Massenet,
Saint-Saëns and, particularly, Delibes, whose music
Elgar played and conducted at Worcester and greatly
admired.
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.
Elgar’s greatest part-songs were written specifically
for the competition festival movement. The course of
his career and the growth of this movement show a
remarkable similarity. In 1884 the
twenty-seven-year-old Worcester musician, virtually
unknown outside his local area, saw the first London
performance of his music when August Manns gave the
short orchestral piece Sevillana at the Crystal Palace.
That same year John Spencer Curwen began a competition
festival at Stratford in east London, and the following
year Mary Wakefield began the Westmoreland Festival at
Kendal. The next fifteen years saw steady rather than
spectacular development but by the turn of the century
Elgar was a national figure, having written a number of
choral works and especially the ‘Enigma’ Variations
(1899) and The Dream of Gerontius (1900). By that time,
too, the importance and influence of the competition
festival movement was widely accepted, and the larger
meetings such as Morecambe warranted detailed coverage
in The Musical Times and other journals. The first
decade of this century represented the peak of success.
Elgar was knighted in 1904; and that same year saw the
foundation of a national umbrella organization, the
Association of Musical Competition Festivals. In 1908
the premiere of Elgar’s First Symphony met with
unprecedented acclaim; and there was by now so much
coverage of competitions in The Musical Times that it
was necessary to publish a supplement, entitled The
Competition Festival Record. Musical commentators spoke
of the ‘choral revival’ which was sweeping the
country. By the outbreak of war in 1914 there had been
a slight levelling off – a decline, even – for both
composer and competitions which continued into the
1920s when flippancy, neo-classical cleverness and
atonality were de rigueur in the musical establishment,
and mass entertainments such as cinema and the
gramophone sapped the strength of the choral
societies.
In late 1907 the Elgars went to Rome for the winter. He
was trying to write a symphony, although he was neither
very well nor at peace with himself, and was constantly
beset with requests for small-scale works. Alfred
Littleton of Novello wanted ‘a marching-song for
soldiers’; F G Edwards, editor of The Musical Times,
asked for a setting of a hymn entitled How calmly the
evening; and Elgar’s old friend Sinclair had
requested a Christmas carol for the cathedral choir at
Hereford. No wonder Elgar wrote to Frank Schuster: ‘I
am trying to write music, but the bitterness is that it
pays not at all & I must write & arrange what my soul
loathes to permit me to write what you like & I
like.’ Yet as well as completing all his commissions,
he found time over Christmas 1907 to compose five of
his finest part-songs – the four Opus 53 songs for
mixed voice; and The Reveille (Op 54) for male voices.
This last – a large-scale, impressive setting,
lasting almost as long as the five Greek Anthology
songs put together – had been commissioned by William
McNaught. However, in view of his protestations to
Schuster about wanting to get on with the real work of
the symphony, it seems strange that he chose to spend
time on four very elaborate and ambitious songs. It
appears that he selected the words of the first three
(by Tennyson, Byron and Shelley) and wrote the fourth
– Owls – himself. The first song, There is Sweet
Music, dedicated to Gorton, Elgar called ‘… a
clinker & the best I have done’. It broke new ground
by being written in two keys at once, the men’s part
in G and the ladies’ in A flat, and it remains an
extreme test of difficulty for a choir. Initially
amateurs avoided it; when it was given its first public
performance in the Open Choir class at the 1909
Morecambe Festival, only five choirs entered, instead
of the usual twenty or so.
Source: AllMusic
(https://www.allmusic.com/composition/songs-4-for-voice
-piano-op-39-mc0002486201).
Although originally written for Voice (Mezzo-Soprano)
and Piano, I created this Interpretation of "There is
Sweet Music" from "Four Songs" (Op. 53 No. 1) for Winds
(Flute, Oboe, French Horn & Bassoon) and Strings (2
Violins, Viola & Cello).
