100 - Elgar Monitor


100 - Elgar

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RAPID MUSIC FOR STRINGS

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When Elgar was a boy, he spent hours on his own,

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riding on his father's pony along the ridges of the Malvern Hills.

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Elgar was born in 1857,

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in the shadow of the hills which were to have such an influence on his music all through his life.

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There was little enough in his circumstances

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to suggest the future Sir Edward Elgar, Master of the King's Music.

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He grew up in Worcester, a stuffy enough place in those days,

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a place for the rich and the well-to-do and the Elgars were neither.

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Their social status was clear.

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They were a lower middle-class family.

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Elgar's father kept a little music shop in the high street.

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By trade he was a piano tuner.

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Elgar was almost entirely self-taught.

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HE PLAYS TRUMPET

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His teachers were the books and instruments lying about in the shop.

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HE PLAYS THE FLUTE

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He was apparently one of those people to whom playing an instrument came naturally.

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HE PLAYS THE VIOLIN

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He said later that his knowledge of orchestration was founded

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on these childhood experiences.

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BELL RINGS

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PIANO PLAYS

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The family lived above the shop.

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Father, mother and five children - all musical.

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They had musical evenings twice a week.

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Elgar's first-known composition was a song he wrote for his sister Lucy to sing on her 21st birthday.

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He was 15.

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He wrote the words as well as the music and it was called The Language Of Flowers.

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# The rose is a sign of joy and love

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# Young blushing love in its earliest dawn

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# And the mildness that suits the gentle dove

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# From the myrtle snowy flower is drawn

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# And the mildness that suits the gentle dove

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# From the myrtle snowy flower is dra-awn. #

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He wrote music for everybody in the household, including a two-part fugue

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which he wrote for a lodger who played the violin and for his brother Frank who played the oboe.

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THEY PLAY VIOLIN AND OBOE DUET

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This was an academic exercise.

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But there was no question of his going to any academy or university.

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And at 15 or 16 he started to serve behind the counter

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at his father's shop.

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He became a high-spirited and very boisterous young man, much given to what he called japes -

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dressing up and jumping out of trees on to the backs of his friends and so on.

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CHORAL AND ORGAN MUSIC

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On Sundays he played the organ at the Catholic church.

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He was born and bred a Roman Catholic

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and it was no accident that the motets and anthems he wrote for this church

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are the first works which reveal the note of an independent musical mind in the making.

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THEY PLAY ORCHESTRAL PIECE

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He also took up small-time conducting.

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His first official conducting appointment

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was with the band of the local Powick Lunatic Asylum

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for whom he also wrote the music.

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TRUMPET SOLO

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ORCHESTRA PLAYS

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Elgar walked the three miles to the asylum

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twice a week for seven years.

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For every quadrille and polka he was paid five shillings.

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For accompaniments to the black and white minstrel songs, then in fashion, he got 1/6.

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Serious composing was still a dream.

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By now he was becoming much in demand as a music teacher.

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And what with that and his bold good looks,

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he cut quite a dashing figure.

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With four friends he formed a serenading group.

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Elgar wrote the music and played the bassoon

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and they played, either for their own amusement, or in a mildly flirtatious way to young women

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of their acquaintance.

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WOODWIND QUINTET PLAYS

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MUSIC PLAYS

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In 1886 when he was 29

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Elgar met the woman who was to transform his life.

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For 10 years his horizon had been firmly bounded by the Malvern Hills.

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He was full of music and full of ambition

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but somehow lacked the drive to cut himself loose.

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Miss Roberts was to change all this.

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Caroline Alice was her name and she was a Major-General's daughter.

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Eight years older than Elgar, she'd taken lessons on the piano from him

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and like many pupils before her she fell in love with him.

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She'd been brought up in a family dedicated to the ideal of service

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but hitherto her life, though earnest, had seemed purposeless.

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Now she'd found a cause and a worthy one at that.

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She would marry Elgar and make him a great composer.

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MUSIC: "Salut d'Amour"

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Her influence on Elgar's music was immediate.

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This piece, Salut d'Amour, was written by Elgar as an engagement present for her.

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MUSIC: "Salut d'Amour" - orchestral version

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"We rode up to the beacon on donkeys," Elgar wrote on a postcard. "Never have I been so happy."

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"I must tell you," he wrote to another friend, "what a dear, loving companion I have,

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"and how sweet everything seems and how understandable existence seems to have grown."

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It was a long and difficult courtship.

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Alice had the hostility of her family to contend with.

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They disapproved violently of her marrying this music teacher

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with his boisterous ways and his dubious prospects.

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Who was, moreover, a tradesman's son and a Roman Catholic.

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MUSIC: "Salut d'Amour"

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Against all opposition, they were finally married in 1889.

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He was 32 and she was 40

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and she was immediately disinherited by her family.

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They spent their honeymoon placidly at Ventnor on the Isle of Wight.

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Elgar gave up all his teaching jobs in Worcestershire

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and full of hopes for the future they set out for London.

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Their plan, Mrs Elgar's plan,

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was to finish with music teaching and concentrate on composing.

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But London in 1890 was not impressed by Mr Elgar from Worcester.

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At his wife's suggestion, he brought with him a whole portfolio of compositions -

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solemn music mostly like Salut d'Amour -

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and these he sent off to a dozen different publishers.

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There was little he could do except sit back and wait.

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And as the manuscripts were returned with a deadening regularity, their optimism slowly drained away.

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It was an anxious time.

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There was no income coming in and they couldn't afford their lease.

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Mrs Elgar was now pregnant and couldn't conceal her anxiety and depression from her diary.

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All her plans were coming to nothing.

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At long last a chance came his way.

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Elgar was invited to rehearse one of his pieces with a big London orchestra.

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If it was liked, it would be performed at one of the promenade concerts held at Covent Garden.

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It was a turning point.

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Elgar arrived at the opera house

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and had to wait till the orchestra finished its routine rehearsal.

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He'd already been waiting some time when an official spoke to him.

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The great Sir Arthur Sullivan had arrived unexpectedly

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and wanted to run through things with the orchestra,

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so there was not question of Mr Elgar's music being tried out. He was so very sorry.

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He became ill as well as depressed.

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He suffered a good deal from a septic wisdom tooth

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and his eyes began to trouble him which would last all his life. He went to as many concerts as he could,

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and practised the violin for many hours a day, but recognition as a composer did not come.

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Desperate for work, he advertised in the London press

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offering himself as a teacher of violin and orchestration.

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He didn't get a single reply.

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Mrs Elgar was no happier

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and she was forced to sell some of her own pieces of personal jewellery.

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It was a sacrifice and it wasn't enough to keep them warm. "The winter has been truly awful," wrote Elgar.

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"The fogs are terrifying and make us very ill. Yesterday all day

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"and today until two we've been in a sort of yellow darkness."

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Mrs Elgar noted in her diary,

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"This was the coldest day I have ever felt. It was the last day of 1890.

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"I could have died with the cold."

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There was only one thing to do and that was to cut their losses.

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The "house to let" sign went up in their home in West Kensington

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and the Elgars, disillusioned and despondent, went back to Worcestershire.

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There was no pony any more, but Elgar bought himself a bike

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and despite all setbacks, almost certainly felt an enormous relief.

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Elgar's head was still full of great orchestral themes,

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not one of which he'd so far ever heard played.

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"My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around me,"

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he once said. "I do all my composing in the open. At home, all I have to do is write it down."

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They re-established themselves in Malvern

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and Elgar went back to teaching. The long climb to recognition began once more.

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Life was dull, provincial and frustrating

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teaching schoolgirls to play the violin and conducting amateurs in poky choirs and orchestras.

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After the birth of their daughter, his wife was always by his side.

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She played the piano at his music lessons, kept the accounts

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and neglected no occasion to push her husband forward.

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She was absolutely determined that he should be a success.

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Elgar himself was full of doubt about his chances of getting a hearing,

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but she remained quietly and relentlessly persistent.

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She wrote to music publishers, corrected the proofs of such little pieces that he got accepted

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and even ruled out the music staves on plain paper

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because they couldn't afford the proper manuscript.

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She forced him to work when it would have been easy to give up.

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The music began to flow and in A Serenade For Strings

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written to celebrate their third wedding anniversary,

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it was a new and richer stream of melody than ever before.

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In the year that he composed the Serenade For Strings,

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Elgar took a job as a violinist at the Three Choirs Festival

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because, as he wrote in his diary, "I could obtain no recognition as a composer."

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Four years later, and he was 39 by now,

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public recognition still hadn't come.

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His background, his lack of connections and his religion were all against him.

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Perhaps it was his wife who suggested a new line of attack, who knows?

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But in the spring of 1897, working in a bell tent that had belonged to the Major General, his father-in-law,

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he composed an Imperial March in honour of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.

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For some reason, this march, now virtually forgotten,

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immediately caught the public imagination in that Jubilee year.

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It was played everywhere and reflected the buoyant spirits and appetite for imperial glory

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that were very much part of Elgar's complicated make up.

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It was frankly popular music and it matched the mood of the day.

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IMPERIAL MARCH PLAYS

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The Imperial March was a success.

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It brought passing glory but nothing in the way of hard cash.

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Nevertheless, money or no money, he went on composing.

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He rented a little cottage which looked out onto the Malvern Hills

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and this was to be his powerhouse for the next ten years.

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Here he wrote Caractacus, the Enigma Variations

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and in 1900, The Dream of Gerontius.

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They went without fires for 12 months while he was composing it.

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The text was a poem by Cardinal Newman which Elgar had been given on his wedding day.

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It tells of the death of Gerontius

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and the experiences of his spirit on its way to his god.

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Elgar was moved by it to compose as never before. "This is what I hear all day," he wrote,

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"The trees are singing my music or have I sung theirs?"

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He worked fast, always composing in the open air, writing it down at night, turning from public pomp

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towards the private agony and ecstasy of a worldly soul in purgatory and beyond.

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It was an intensely visionary and an intensely Catholic work

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and Elgar was in no doubt about its stature.

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"This is the best of me," he wrote, quoting Ruskin at the end of the score.

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"For the rest, I ate, I drank, I slept, I loved, I hated as another.

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"My life is a vapour and is not. This is what I saw and know.

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"This, if anything of mine, is worth your memory."

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# Sanctus fortis

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# Sanctus Deus

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# De profundis

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# Oro te

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# Miserere

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# Judex meus

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# Mortis

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# Mortis in discrimine... #

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"This, if anything, is worth your memory," he'd said.

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But the first performance of Gerontius was a disaster.

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"I have worked hard for 40 years,

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"and at the last, Providence denies me a decent hearing of my work."

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It was left to Germany and the Germans to confirm what Mrs Elgar had been saying for 12 years -

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England had a great composer.

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Elgar's music was suddenly discovered by the famous German composer Hans Richter.

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Gerontius was performed at Dusseldorf in the presence of the composer and his wife.

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A terrific German enthusiasm flared up, culminating in a speech by Richard Strauss the composer

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who hailed Elgar as the first modern genius of English music.

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The Elgars were inveterate postcard writers and their postcards to their daughter at home

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told of triumph after triumph.

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"Most splendid evening. Beautiful performance received with rapture.

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"Father shouted for again and again.

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"So glad to have your letter. Weather dreadful.

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"A great supper during the festival this evening.

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"At rehearsal they cheered and cheered,

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"wish you were here. Much love."

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"Delighted to tell you performance glorious.

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"Last evening, audience so astounded. We are so thankful.

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"We had a delightful supper party. Not back until 1.30."

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At last, Elgar had arrived and with a bang. But only in Germany.

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Back home with his daughter, Elgar took up kite flying

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and as usual, went headlong into a new hobby.

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His friends were worried about his career

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but he was to confound them by using their very doubts and worries,

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their personal characters, as material for a set of variations on an original theme.

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It was these Enigma Variations that finally got him recognised in England.

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The character of Caroline Alice his wife, inspired the first of the variations.

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Richard Arnold, son of Matthew Arnold,

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solemn and witty by turns provided another, as did Basil Nevinson

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cello player and devoted friend of the composer.

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A bulldog belonging to the organist of Hereford Cathedral was the subject of a fourth.

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There were 13 all told

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but the character that emerged most strongly, the key to the Enigma,

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was Edward Elgar himself - confident and masterful.

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What had happened so sensationally in Germany was now happening in England.

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Almost overnight, the unknown Mr Elgar became the great Sir Edward Elgar.

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Within three years, he was firmly established as a major international figure.

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His portrait was hung in Windsor Castle, he hobnobbed with kings.

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The great roll call of honours started. He was honoured by universities and states worldwide.

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"He deserves all these honours," wrote Sir Hubert Parry.

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"In his music, he has reached to the hearts of the people."

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"The triumph is yours as well as his," Elgar's nearest friend told Lady Elgar.

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On the face of it, she now had all she wanted -

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a big new house in Hereford - Elgar could live the life of a country gentleman.

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But success having come, Elgar was not happy.

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Behind the facade of new prosperity, there were constant money worries.

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The house was bigger than they could afford.

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His illnesses became chronic and his inspiration came only in fits and starts.

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"I see nothing in the future," he wrote, "except a black stone wall

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"against which I am longing to dash my head."

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To his wife he talked sometimes of suicide.

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By turns boisterous and lugubrious, impulsive and reserved

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he drew apart from the world.

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One extraordinary method of withdrawal this time

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was into a new hobby - a sort of DIY chemistry.

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He tried to make a new kind of soap and actually did invent and patent

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a thing called the Elgar Sulphurated Hydrogen Apparatus.

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EXPLOSION

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Yet these were the years of Elgar's finest works -

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the symphonies, the Violin Concerto, Falstaff and the rest.

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Side by side with these schoolboy pranks and these black despairs

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there was a deep faith in humanity.

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"There is no programme in my music," he said, "beyond a wide experience of human life

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"with a great charity and love and a massive hope in the future."

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Three years later in 1910, he was much less hopeful.

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The period was opulent but he'd become anxious and uneasy.

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These times are cruel and gloomy.

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He'd come to see himself increasingly as a kind of Poet Laureate of music

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and in his Second Symphony he'd originally set out to celebrate the idea of monarchy

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but with the death of Edward VII and his own mounting feelings of anxiety

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it became an elegy, charged with what WB Yeats called Elgar's heroic melancholy -

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an elegy for the passing of an age and a warning.

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It was as if he sensed disaster in the air.

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"We walk," he said, "like ghosts."

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SYMPHONY NUMBER 2 PLAYS

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ELGAR'S SYMPHONY NUMBER 2 CONTINUES

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In 1914, the tensions were released

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and a song which Elgar had written in one of his exuberant moods in 1901

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at the time of the Boer War became a rallying call to a nation.

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Elgar was delighted. "I look on the composer's job," he once said,

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"as the old Troubadours did. In those days it was no disgrace

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"for a man to be turned on to step in front of an army and inspire them with a song.

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"For my part, I know there are a lot of people who like to celebrate events with music.

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"To these people, I have given tunes."

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MARCH NUMBER 1 PLAYS: "Land of Hope And Glory"

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"A tune like this only comes once in a lifetime," he once said.

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He was proud of his marches. The words were not his and he disapproved of them as too jingoistic.

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There would come a time when Elgar could no longer bear what would become a second national anthem.

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There was a terrible irony in having a march written in the dashing, glinting days of 1900

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used as a battle hymn against the nation he loved so much,

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used almost as an accompaniment to the growing horror of World War I.

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ELGAR'S MARCH NUMBER 1 PLAYS: "Land of Hope And Glory"

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As the gates of Armageddon opened in France,

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Elgar, too old to serve, left London for Sussex and turned from chamber music to sonatas and quintets.

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Nothing, however, could sever the public's association of Elgar with his Boer War marching song.

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And the irony to a man who had sensed the disaster to come and felt its impact became abominable.

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ELGAR'S MARCH NUMBER 1 CONTINUES

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CROWD CHEER

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The relief of the armistice was not shared by Elgar.

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During the early fighting he'd written various patriotic pieces

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but fewer and fewer as the war dragged on.

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Now in 1918, he was invited to write an anthem for peace.

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He refused point blank.

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Official music had become an abomination.

0:39:580:40:01

He had rented a cottage in the middle of a wood and in 1919

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he put all his sadness and desolation into a cello concerto, his last great work.

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MUSIC: "Cello Concerto in E Minor" by Elgar

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In 1920 came the deepest grief of all,

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the death, quite suddenly, of his wife Alice.

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He put their London home in shrouds and lived in a corner of the house.

0:42:590:43:03

He buried all his honours in his wife's coffin

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and composed nothing, his only musical activity was to arrange a Bach organ work for full orchestra.

0:43:070:43:12

He turned now not to chemistry but to biology,

0:43:120:43:16

kept three microscopes on an unused billiards table

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and got some kind of solace from the cold and abstract patterns of life thus revealed.

0:43:190:43:24

# Land of hope and glory

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# Mother of the free... #

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In 1924, he was called on to conduct his music at the Royal opening of the Wembley Empire Exhibition.

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CROWDS CHEER

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Elgar had planned to perform some new music, "But the king," he wrote, "insists on Land of Hope.

0:44:460:44:51

"Music is dying fast in this country.

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"Everything seems so hopelessly and irredeemably vulgar in court."

0:44:540:44:58

The whole clatter and bang of Wembley he found intolerable.

0:45:160:45:20

He described his feelings during the royal parade. "I was in the middle of the enormous stadium,

0:45:390:45:43

"surrounded by all the ridiculous court programme, aeroplanes circling, loudspeakers, amplifiers

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"all mechanical and horrible. No soul, no romance and no imagination."

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MUSIC: "Land Of Hope And Glory"

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# Lord who made thee mighty

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# Make thee mighty again. #

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CHILDREN SING: # Lord who made thee mighty

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# Make thee mighty... #

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TENOR SINGS: # Lord who made thee mighty

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# Make thee mighty again! #

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Elgar could stand it no more, and this time he left London for good,

0:47:370:47:41

driving back to the Malvern Hills alone except for his dogs.

0:47:410:47:45

He had loved dogs all his life. His wife had hated them and wouldn't allow one in the house.

0:47:450:47:50

Now he was never without them - his only companions.

0:47:500:47:53

Elgar had gone back to his roots, to Worcester.

0:49:270:49:31

There he lived out his life as a country gentleman.

0:49:310:49:34

Further honours came his way, he'd become a member of the Order of Merit

0:49:340:49:39

and had been honoured by a dozen universities. Now he was a baronet

0:49:390:49:42

and a master of the King's music.

0:49:420:49:45

But the cold wind of indifference blew over his public reputation.

0:49:450:49:48

When he went occasionally to London to conduct a concert of his music,

0:49:480:49:52

it was, wrote Constance Lambert,

0:49:520:49:54

"as if one of the classical composers had appeared to conduct a work of another age."

0:49:540:50:00

The times were out of sympathy with a full-blooded romantic

0:50:000:50:04

and the drum-beating patriot and the religious visionary

0:50:040:50:07

and Elgar had been all three.

0:50:070:50:10

In the year he wrote his first symphony

0:50:100:50:12

it had been played 82 times all over the world, from St Petersburg to Pennsylvania.

0:50:120:50:17

He probably was the last great composer to be in touch with the people,

0:50:170:50:22

but now the rare Elgar concerts were half-empty.

0:50:220:50:25

In the early '30s, when he was rising 75,

0:50:250:50:28

Elgar took on a brief new lease of life - a lively friendship with Bernard Shaw

0:50:280:50:32

and the excitement of working once more on his violin concerto with a young Yehudi Menuhin

0:50:320:50:37

and sketches for a new symphony and an opera.

0:50:370:50:41

But it was too late. The illnesses which had haunted him all his life

0:50:410:50:44

took their final grip and he was forced to take to his bed.

0:50:440:50:49

He arranged it so that through the window he could see Worcester Cathedral

0:50:490:50:54

and the Malvern hills beyond. There, he lay for hour after hour

0:50:540:50:59

listening to recordings of his music and according to his own account

0:50:590:51:03

drifting through his memories in search of those moments

0:51:030:51:07

and people and places that had brought him happiness and fulfilment.

0:51:070:51:12

MUSIC: "Enigma Variations" by Elgar

0:51:120:51:14

STATIC FROM NEEDLE

0:53:200:53:22

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd 2007

0:54:070:54:10

E-mail: [email protected]

0:54:100:54:13

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