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Edward Elgar Quotes

Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet, 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 became immediately popular in Britain and overseas. He followed the Variations with a choral work, The Dream of Gerontius , 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.

In his fifties, Elgar composed a symphony and a violin concerto that were immensely successful. His second symphony and his cello concerto did not gain immediate public popularity and took many years to achieve a regular place in the concert repertory of British orchestras. Elgar's music came, in his later years, to be seen as appealing chiefly to British audiences. His stock remained low for a generation after his death. It began to revive significantly in the 1960s, helped by new recordings of his works. Some of his works have, in recent years, been taken up again internationally, but the music continues to be played more in Britain than elsewhere.

Elgar has been described as the first composer to take the gramophone seriously. Between 1914 and 1925, he conducted a series of acoustic recordings of his works. The introduction of the moving-coil microphone in 1923 made far more accurate sound reproduction possible, and Elgar made new recordings of most of his major orchestral works and excerpts from The Dream of Gerontius. Wikipedia  

✵ 2. June 1857 – 23. February 1934
Edward Elgar photo
Edward Elgar: 9   quotes 0   likes

Famous Edward Elgar Quotes

“Elgar is not manic enough to be Russian, not witty or pointilliste enough to be French, not harmonically simple enough to be Italian and not stodgy enough to be German. We arrive at his Englishry by pure elimination.”

Edward Elgar

Anthony Burgess in The Observer, 1983; reprinted in his Homage to Qwert Yuiop (London: Abacus, 1987) p. 567.
Criticism

“Play it like something you hear down by the river.”

Edward Elgar

Diana M McVeagh Edward Elgar: His Life and Music (London: J. M. Dent, 1955) p. 163.
On the trio of the second movement of his Symphony No. 1.

“People who talk of the spread of music in England and the increasing love of it, rarely seem to know where the growth of the art is really strong and properly fostered: some day the press will awake to the fact, already known abroad and to some few of us in England, that the living centre of music in Great Britain is not London, but somewhere further North.”

Edward Elgar

Letter to Canon Gorton, organizer of the Morecambe Music Festival, published in The Musical Times, July 1903.

“The enigma I will not explain – its "dark saying" must be left unguessed, and I warn you that the apparent connection between the variations and the theme is often of the slightest texture.”

Edward Elgar

Elgar's programme note to the Enigma Variations, quoted in Simon Mundy Elgar (London: Omnibus Press, [1980] 2001) p. 64.

“To my friends pictured within.”

Edward Elgar

Dedication to the Enigma Variations (1899).

“His range is so Handelian that he can give the people a universal melody or march with as sure a hand as he can give the Philharmonic Society a symphonic adagio, such as has not been given since Beethoven died.”

Edward Elgar

George Bernard Shaw, in Music and Letters, January 1920.
Criticism

“My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us, the world is full of it and you simply take as much as you require.”

Edward Elgar

In conversation in 1896, quoted in R J Buckley Sir Edward Elgar (London: Bodley Head, 1905), p. 32.

“The aggressive Edwardian prosperity that lends so comfortable a background to Elgar's finales is now as strange to us as the England that produced Greensleeves and The Woodes so wilde. Stranger, in fact, and less sympathetic. In consequence much of Elgar's music, through no fault of its own, has for the present generation an almost intolerable air of smugness, self-assurance and autocratic benevolence.”

Edward Elgar

Constant Lambert Music Ho! (London: Hogarth Press, [1934] 1985) p. 240.
Criticism

“I always said God was against art and I still believe it. Anything obscene or trivial is blessed in this world and has a reward – I ask for no reward – only to live & to hear my work.”

Edward Elgar

Letter to A. J. Jaeger, October 9, 1900.

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