The Horsell's Mouth Politics, pedantry and personal interests

Sir Edward on the cusp of fame, c1900

Apologies for no updates during the past few days, I’ve been having connection problems with Virgin Media – no great surprise, I’m sure – and contrary to what you might think, paying a premium for fibre optic broadband doesn’t seem to buy you any better service or reliability than anything else.

They are still fixing the problem but I’ll start by doing a posting that I missed out on June 2. Anyone who knows me well knows that I have a great passion for classical music and particular the works of Sir Edward Elgar. Having read just about everything ever written about him, having studied his manuscripts and letters and done my own research on his life and works, if you except the academic world, I’d probably count as a bit of an authority on him and June 2 is his birthday (153rd this year).

To many people, Elgar means pomp and circumstance, pageantry and marching and for the political it can mean Edwardian complacency and Imperial folly. That’s fine, I’m not going to say that Elgar wasn’t a proud patriot and a Conservative and that he eschewed the values of Empire. He didn’t – he opposed Irish Home Rule and despaired about what he saw as the threat of socialism.

But he was far more complex a man than that. Born the son of a lowly music shop owner, he fought all his life against the social barriers of Victorian England, not to mention the religious ones – the son of a Roman Catholic convert, he encountered the full weight of prejudice that the largely semi-aristocratic musical establishment had to offer. The family of his wife Alice were utterly opposed to their marriage – her father was a Major-General in India and it was considered she was marrying substantially beneath her – in age as well as class.

Unlike his peers, he didn’t have a formal academic musical education and was self-taught. He tried to move to London twice but had to give up for financial reasons and return to Worcester – and was generally viewed as a provincial non-entity by his contemporaries until 1899, when he was 42. That year, having made a modest name for himself writing secular oratorios for the many and various choral societies that provided a social and musical backbone of Victorian middle-class life, Elgar decided to write an orchestral work based on his friends, representing them or a facet of them in music.

Elgar the man was not at all pompous or stiff – he could be jovial, easy-going and excitable but also prone to mood swings, immaturity and deep nostalgia. He was a dreamer, often tied down by self-doubt who kept few close companions but many acquaintances and he loved puzzles and cyphers of every kind from crosswords to musical conundrums. An orchestral work that used references to people that only he and a few others would “get” appealed to him hugely and he made the puzzle even deeper by included in it a “larger theme” that he said “‘goes’, but is not played”.

The resulting work was the Enigma Variations, which began the journey of Elgar from plain Edward Elgar, three counties musician, to Sir Edward Elgar, 1st Baronet, OM, GVCO, Master of the King’s Musik. The man whose in-laws had written his wife out of her inheritance for marrying him ended up towering above them all in the order of precedence. And while Nimrod is the most famous variation that we all know, they are all fantastic and worth listening to – showing as they do the many sides of Elgar’s character.

I have a wonderful drawing of Elgar’s birthplace in Broadheath above my piano. And here is my little birthday tribute to him.