![]() ![]() Elgar coached the players and wrote and arranged their music, including quadrilles and polkas, for the unusual combination of instruments. The band consisted of: piccolo, flute, clarinet, two cornets, euphonium, three or four first and a similar number of second violins, occasional viola, cello, double bass and piano. At twenty-two he took up the post of conductor of the attendants' band at the Worcester and County Lunatic Asylum in Powick, three miles (five km) from Worcester. Pollitzer believed that, as a violinist, Elgar had the potential to be one of the leading soloists in the country, but Elgar himself, having heard leading virtuosi at London concerts, felt his own violin playing lacked a full enough tone, and he abandoned his ambitions to be a soloist. He was an active member of the Worcester Glee club, along with his father, and he accompanied singers, played the violin, composed and arranged works, and conducted for the first time. ![]() ![]() Around this time, he made his first public appearances as a violinist and organist.Īfter a few months, Elgar left the solicitor to embark on a musical career, giving piano and violin lessons and working occasionally in his father's shop. He did not find an office career congenial, and for fulfilment he turned not only to music but to literature, becoming a voracious reader. Years later, a profile in The Musical Times considered that his failure to get to Leipzig was fortunate for Elgar's musical development: "Thus the budding composer escaped the dogmatism of the schools." However, it was a disappointment to Elgar that on leaving school in 1872 he went not to Leipzig but to the office of a local solicitor as a clerk. Elgar began to learn German, in the hope of going to the Leipzig Conservatory for further musical studies, but his father could not afford to send him. He later said that he had been most helped by Hubert Parry's articles in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. from books borrowed from the music library, when I was eight, nine or ten." He worked through manuals of instruction on organ playing and read every book he could find on the theory of music. Elgar said, "my first music was learnt in the Cathedral . However, his only formal musical training beyond piano and violin lessons from local teachers consisted of more advanced violin studies with Adolf Pollitzer, during brief visits to London in 1877–78. Until he was fifteen, Elgar received a general education at Littleton (now Lyttleton) House school, near Worcester. By the age of eight, Elgar was taking piano and violin lessons, and his father, who tuned the pianos at many grand houses in Worcestershire, would sometimes take him along, giving him the chance to display his skill to important local figures. All the Elgar children received a musical upbringing. At his instigation, masses by Cherubini and Hummel were first heard at the Three Choirs Festival by the orchestra in which he played the violin. William Elgar was a violinist of professional standard and held the post of organist of St George's Roman Catholic Church, Worcester, from 1846 to 1885. Ann Elgar had converted to Roman Catholicism shortly before Edward's birth, and he was baptised and brought up as a Roman Catholic, to the disapproval of his father. Edward was the fourth of their seven children. In 1848 he married Ann Greening (1822–1902), daughter of a farm worker. In 1841 William moved to Worcester, where he worked as a piano tuner and set up a shop selling sheet music and musical instruments. His father, William Henry Elgar (1821–1906), was raised in Dover and had been apprenticed to a London music publisher. His later full-length religious choral works were well received but have not entered the regular repertory.Įdward Elgar was born in the small village of Lower Broadheath, outside Worcester, England. 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. 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 nevertheless married the daughter of a senior British Army officer. 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 felt himself to be an outsider, not only musically, but socially. Although Elgar is often regarded as a typically English composer, most of his musical influences were not from England but from continental Europe. ![]()
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