The British composer Edward Elgar was born at Broadheath, Worcester, in 1857. The son of a musician, he showed an early aptitude for music, learning to play the violin, organ and other instruments, as well as composing; after leaving school he continued his musical activities, performing with a variety of groups and writing several successful pieces of light music. Having married in 1889, a year later he received a commission from the Three Choirs Festival for the overture Froissart and in 1893 he completed The Black Knight, the first of many choral works that were taken up by the great choral societies of the Midlands and North of England.

During this period Elgar had continued to earn his living as a violin teacher, but in 1899 he had his first major success in London when Hans Richter conducted his Variations on an Original Theme (Enigma). This was followed in quick succession by Sea Pictures, premiered at the Norwich Festival, and The Dream of Gerontius, composed for the 1900 Birmingham Festival. Gerontius was acclaimed in Germany after successful performances at Dusseldorf, and thereafter a vogue for Elgar’s music developed on the continent: from 1901 to 1914 he was the composer of the day. During this time he wrote a succession of masterpieces: the overture Cockaigne, the Introduction and Allegro for Strings, the choral works The Apostles and The Kingdom, the symphonic study Falstaff, and the two symphonies. His most popular work was the Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 which came to epitomise the Edwardian era in British history.

During World War I, Elgar composed a number of overtly patriotic works, as well as incidental music for the children’s play The Starlight Express, followed between 1918 and 1919 by three chamber works and the Cello Concerto. These however were to be his last major compositions; in 1920 his wife died and he composed very little henceforth that was not drawn from earlier sketches. Having settled in Worcestershire in 1922 he remained active as a conductor of his own works, becoming Master of the King’s Musick in 1922 and in 1931 being made a baronet. He died in Worcestershire in 1934.

Elgar’s success as a composer lay in his unusual ability to combine nobility and grandeur of utterance with a popular style: in mood his music successfully ranged from extrovert warmth to deep introspective melancholy. Alongside his large-scale works he composed many miniatures, notable for their charm and craftsmanship. Both appealed to the many different musical constituencies of the period. A master of orchestration and choral effect, Elgar’s harmonic language derives from Schumann and Brahms, flecked with the chromaticism of Wagner. He remains one of the very greatest of English composers.

A keen supporter of the gramophone and of the recording industry, Elgar realised that this presented for the first time a means of disseminating music, and especially his own, outside the concert hall without the consumer having to be able to read notation. The first major composer to grasp the potential and influence of the gramophone, between 1914 and 1933 he made many recordings of his own music, which are important historical and musical documents. His relationship with The Gramophone Company, which became Electric and Musical Industries in 1931, was close. Fred Gaisberg, its chief producer of classical music from its inception, engaged him to record for the company in 1914 and Elgar remained a central figure on its classical music roster until his death, giving the label keenly-sought social prestige. This relationship is the subject of Jerrold Northrop Moore’s excellent study, Elgar on Record, first published by the Oxford University Press and EMI in 1974.

There are two sets of recordings on which Elgar conducts his own works (he did not record the music of any composer other than himself ). The first set was made between 1914 and 1925 and used the acoustic method of recording. Here orchestral players would cluster around a large recording horn which funnelled the sound down to a vibrating stylus that in turn cut a wax disc. Under this primitive method, the size of the orchestra had to be drastically reduced, since only so many players could gather around the horn to be heard by it. Sound reproduction was often (although not always) coarse, and scores were often savagely cut. While these recordings are now of most interest to the aficionado and historian, they still tell us a great deal about performance style at the time of recording, and about how Elgar himself conceived the performance of his music. With the introduction of electrical recording in 1925 a far higher degree of aural fidelity was possible than had previously been achieved, through the use of the electrically-driven microphone which possessed a more extensive frequency response than the acoustic horn. A full symphony orchestra could now be captured with much greater realism. In addition tastes were changing and the recording of complete works, often now uncut, became commonplace. Between 1926 and 1933 Elgar re-recorded most of his major compositions, as well as many minor works, using this new technology.

While composers may not always be the best interpreters of their own music, Elgar was an experienced conductor, and although contemporary accounts suggest a rather rigid beat, his facial expression and left-hand gestures were evidently extremely expressive. For the 1911–1912 season he had been the conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, leading six out of its thirteen concerts alongside other conductors of the calibre of Nikisch, Mengelberg and Steinbach. Orchestral musicians held him in great respect and responded very positively to his direction. By today’s standards his tempi were very fast indeed, but were tempered by his subtle use of rubato (variations of tempo within a movement). As a result Elgar’s performances combined an urgent sense of forward drive that was brisk and bold with a strong sense of flexibility and thus at times reflection, assisted by his generous use of portamento (sliding from one note to another, especially in the stringed instruments). Vibrato was less obvious than it later became, and rhythm was often less precisely defined. As Robert Philip has noted, Elgar’s recordings document the stylistic changes that took place during the inter-war years in British orchestral playing. The early recordings were made with orchestras such as the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra, essentially a freelance organisation, which was disbanded in 1930. With the growth of both broadcasting and commercial recording, full-time orchestras were created to service these new forms of musical dissemination: in England these were the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Both were used for some of Elgar’s later recordings. The early recordings, especially the acoustic versions, show the older, less disciplined, more free-wheeling manner of performance, while the later recordings and notably those with the new orchestras, demonstrate what has become the more modern and disciplined style of playing.

All of Elgar’s recordings are of great interest. Particularly outstanding are his later recordings of the Violin Concerto (with Yehudi Menuhin), and of the Symphonies Nos 1 and 2, all recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra. Elgar’s account of his Enigma Variations was recorded with the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra, whose playing contained many of the lost characteristics described above. He recorded his overture Cockaigne, subtitled ‘In London Town’, twice for electrical recording, the first time with the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra and the second with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Comparison of these two accounts vividly illustrates the changes in orchestral performance precipitated by the new technologies of the twentieth century.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Patmore (A–Z of Conductors, Naxos 8.558087–90).