Original subtitles

(I ELGAR: "lntr0ducti0n and Allegro")

(Huw Wheldon) When Elgar was a boy, he spent hours on his own,

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

Elgar was born in 1857,

in the shadow of the hills which were to have such an influence on his music,

all through his life.

There was little enough in his circumstances to suggest

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

He grew up in Worcester,

a stuffy enough place, in those days.

A place for the rich and the well-to-do,

the Elgars were neither.

Their social status was clear:

they were a lower-middle-class family.

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

By trade, he was a piano tuner.

Elgar was almost entirely self-taught.

(I HAYDN: "Trumpet Concerto")

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

He was, apparently, one of those people

to whom playing an instrument came naturally.

He said, later, that his knowledge of orchestration

was founded on these childhood experiences.

(Bell tolls)

The family lived above the shop.

Father, Mother, and five children. All musical.

They had musical evenings, twice a week.

Elgar's first known composition was a song he wrote for his sister Lucy

to sing on her 21st birthday.

He was 15.

He wrote the words as well as the music,

and it was called The Language of Flowers.

(Woman) J“ The rose is a sign of joy and love

J” Young blushing love in its earliest dawn

J“ And the mildness that suits the gentle dove

J“ From the myrtle's snowy flower is drawn

J“ And the mildness that suits the gentle dove

J“ From the myrtle's snowy flower is drawn J“

(Wheldon) He wrote music for everybody in the household,

including a two-part fugue, which he wrote for a lodger

who played the violin, and for his brother Frank,

who played the oboe.

This was an academic exercise,

but there was no question of his going to any academy or university,

and at 15 or 16, he started to serve behind the counter

at his father's shop.

He became a high-spirited and very boisterous young man,

much given to what he called japes:

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

(Choir) ♪ O, salutaris... J“

(Wheldon) On Sundays, he played the organ at the Catholic church.

He was born and bred a Roman Catholic

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

are the first works which revealed a note of an independent musical mind

in the making.

J“ ...H0stia

J“ Da robur, fer auxilium

J“ Bella premunt

J“ Hostilia

J“ Da robur

♪ Fer auxilium

J“ Auxilium

(p Polka)

(Wheldon) He also took up small-time conducting.

His first official conducting appointment

was with the band of the local Powick Lunatic Asylum,

for whom he also wrote the music.

Elgar walked the three miles to the asylum,

twice a week, for seven years.

For every quadrille and polka he was paid five shillings.

For accompaniment to the black-and- white-minstrel songs then in fashion,

he got one and six.

Serious composing was still a dream.

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

and what with that and his bold good looks,

he cut quite a dashing figure.

With four friends, he formed a serenading group.

Elgar wrote the music and played the bassoon,

when they played, either for their own amusement

or, in a mildly flirtatious way, to young women of their acquaintance.

(I ELGAR: "Minuet")

(Music obscures speech)

(Wheldon) In 1886, when he was 29,

Elgar met the woman who was to transform his life.

For ten years, his horizon had been firmly bounded

by the Malvern Hills.

He was full of music and full of ambition

but somehow lacked the drive to cut himself loose.

Miss Roberts was to change all this.

Caroline Alice was her name

and she was a major general's daughter.

Eight years older than Elgar,

she'd taken lessons on the piano from him

and like many pupils before her,

she fell in love with him.

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

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

Now, she'd found a cause,

and a worthy one at that.

She would marry Elgar and make him a great composer.

(I ELGAR: "Salut d'Am0ur")

Her influence on Elgar's music was immediate.

This piece ,5'a/uf dfi4mour,

was written by Elgar as an engagement present for her.

(Orchestra plays Sa/uf dfi4mour)

"We rode up to the Beacon on donkeys," Elgar wrote on a postcard.

"Never have I been so happy."

"I must tell you," he wrote to another friend,

"what a dear, loving companion I have, and how sweet everything seems

"and how understandable existence seems to have grown."

(Wheldon) It was a long and difficult courtship.

Alice had the hostility of her family to contend with.

They disapproved violently of her marrying this music teacher,

with his boisterous ways and his dubious prospects,

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

Against all opposition, they were finally married in 1889.

He was 32 and she was 40,

and she was immediately disinherited by her family.

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

Elgar gave up all his teaching jobs in Worcestershire

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

(Clip-clop of hooves)

Their plan, Mrs Elgar's plan,

was to finish with music teaching and concentrate on composing.

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

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

salon music mostly, like Sa/uf dfi4mour,

and these he sent off to a dozen different publishers.

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

and as the manuscripts were returned with a deadening regularity,

their optimism slowly drained away.

It was an anxious time.

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

Mrs Elgar was now pregnant

and couldn't conceal her anxiety and depression from her diary.

All her plans were coming to nothing.

At long last, a chance came his way.

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

If it was liked, it would be performed at one of the promenade concerts,

which were, apparently, held, in those days, at Covent Garden.

It was a turning point.

(Fast waltz)

(Wheldon) Elgar arrived at the opera house,

but had to wait until the orchestra had finished its routine rehearsal.

He'd already been waiting for some time

when an official came down to speak to him.

It seemed that the great Sir Arthur Sullivan had arrived unexpectedly

and wanted to run through a few things with the orchestra.

So there was no question of Mr Elgar's music being tried out.

He was really so sorry. So very sorry.

He became ill as well as depressed.

He suffered a good deal from a septic wisdom tooth

and his eyes began to give him trouble, which was to last all his life.

He went to as many concerts as he could

and practised the violin for many hours a day,

but recognition as a composer did not come.

Desperate for work, he advertised in the London press,

offering himself as a teacher of violin and orchestration.

He didn't get a single reply.

Mrs Elgar was no happier and she was forced to sell

some of her own bits and pieces of personal jewellery.

It was a sacrifice and it wasn't enough to keep them warm.

"The winter here has been truly awful," wrote Elgar.

"The fogs are terrifying and make us very ill.

"Yesterday, all day, and today until two,

"we've been in a sort of yellow darkness."

Mrs Elgar noted in her diary:

"This was the coldest day I have ever felt.

"It was the last day of 1890.

"I could have died with a cold."

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

The "House To Let" sign went up on their home in West Kensington

and the Elgars, disillusioned and despondent,

went back to Worcestershire.

(I ELGAR: "lntr0ducti0n and Allegro")

There was no pony anymore, but Elgar bought himself a bike,

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

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

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

"My idea is that there is music in the air. Music all around me," he once said.

"I do all my composing in the open. At home, all I have to do

"is write it down."

They re-established themselves in Malvern

and Elgar went back to teaching.

The long climb to recognition began once more.

Life was dull, provincial, and frustrating,

teaching schoolgirls to play the violin

and conducting amateurs in poky choirs and orchestras.

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

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

and neglected no occasion to push her husband forward.

She was absolutely determined that he should be a success.

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

she remained quietly and relentlessly persistent.

She wrote to music publishers, corrected the proofs

of such little pieces as he got accepted,

and even ruled out the music staves on plain paper,

because they couldn't afford the proper manuscript.

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

The music began to flow and 'm the Serenade for Strings,

written to celebrate their third wedding anniversary,

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

In the year that he composed the Serenade for Strings

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

because, he wrote in his diary,

"I could obtain no recognition as a composer."

(Wheldon) Four years later, and he was 39 by now,

public recognition still hadn't come.

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

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

But in the spring of 1897,

working, of all places, in a bell tent that had belonged to his father-in-law,

the major general,

he composed an imperial march in honour of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.

(P ELGAR: "imperial March")

For some reason, this march, now virtually forgotten,

immediately caught the public imagination in that jubilee year.

It was played here, there, and everywhere.

It reflected the buoyant high spirits and the appetite for imperial glory

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

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

The Imperial March was a success.

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

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

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

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

Here he wrote Caracfacus the Enigma Var/zfi/ans

and, 'm 19%, The Dream of Gerontius.

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

The text was a poem by Cardinal Newman,

which Elgar had been given on his wedding day.

It tells of the death of Gerontius and the experiences of his spirit,

on its way to his God.

Elgar was moved by it to compose as never before.

"This is what I hear all day," he wrote in a letter.

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

He worked fast, always composing in the open air,

writing it down at night,

turning his mind from public pomp

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

It was an intensely visionary and an intensely Catholic work,

and Elgar was in no doubt about its stature.

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

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

"My life was a vapour and is not,

"but this is what I saw and know.

"This, if anything of mine,

"is worth your memory."

(Tenor) J“ Sanctus

J“ Fortis

♪ Sanctus Deus

J“ De profundis

♪ Ore Xe

J“ Misere

J“ Judex meus

♪ Moms, moms

J” In discrimine... ♪

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

But the first performance of Geronf/us was a disaster.

"I have worked hard for 40 years

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

(Wheldon) It was left to Germany and the Germans to confirm

what Mrs Elgar had been saying for 12 years.

England had a great composer.

Elgar's music was suddenly discovered by the famous German conductor

Hans Richter.

Geronf/us was performed at Dusseldorf

in the presence of the composer and his wife.

A terrific German enthusiasm suddenly flared up,

culminating in a speech by Richard Strauss, the composer,

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

The Elgars were inveterate postcard-writers

and their postcards to their daughter at home

told of triumph after triumph.

"Most splendid evening. Beautiful performance received with rapture."

"Father shouted for again and again."

"So glad to have your letter. Weather dreadful."

"A great dinner here today and a great supper during the festival this evening."

"At rehearsal, they cheered and cheered. Wish you were here. Much love."

"Delighted to tell you, performance glorious."

"Last evening, the audience was quite astounded. I am so thankful.

"We had a delightful supper party. Not back until one-thirty."

At last, Elgar had arrived, and with a bang.

But only in Germany.

(P ELGAR: "Enigma Variations - Theme")

(Wheldon) Back home, with his daughter, Elgar took up kite-flying

and, as usual, went headlong into a new hobby.

His friends were worried about his career,

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

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

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

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

Richard Arnold, son of Matthew Arnold,

solemn and witty, by turns, provided another,

as did Basil Nevinson, cello player and devoted friend of the composer.

A bulldog belonging to the organist of Hereford Cathedral

was the subject of a forth.

There were 13, all told, but the character which emerged most strongly throughout,

the key to the enigma, perhaps,

was Edward Elgar himself, confident and masterful.

(P ELGAR: "Enigma Variations - Finale: Allegro - E.D.U.")

(I ELGAR: "Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1")

(Wheldon) What had happened so sensationally in Germany

was now happening in England.

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

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

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

The great roll call of honour started.

He was to be honoured by universities, academies, and states all over the world.

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

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

(I ELGAR: "Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1")

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

On the face of it, she now had all that she wanted.

From their big new house in Hereford,

Elgar could live the life of a country gentleman.

But success having come, Elgar was not happy.

Behind the facade of new prosperity,

there was a constant worry about money.

The house, as usual, was bigger than they could afford.

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

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

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

To his wife, he talked, sometimes, of suicide.

By turns, boisterous and lugubrious, impulsive and reserved,

he drew apart from the world.

One extraordinary method of withdrawal, this time, was into a new hobby,

a sort of do-it-yourself chemistry.

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

and take out a patent for a thing called

the Elgar Sulphuretted Hydrogen Apparatus.

(Gurgliflg)

(Explosion)

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

The symphoxfles, the violin concerto, Falstaff, and the rest.

Side by side with these schoolboy pranks and black despairs,

there was a deep faith in humanity.

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

"of human life. With a great charity and love, and a massive hope in the future."

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

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

"These times are cruel and gloomy."

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

and in his second symphony, he'd originally set out

to celebrate the idea of monarchy.

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

it became an elegy, charged with what WB Yeats called

"Elgar's heroic melancholy".

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

It was as if he sensed disaster in the air.

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

(P ELGAR: "Symphony No. 2")

(I ELGAR: "Pomp and Circumstance March No. 2")

(Wheldon) In 1914, the tensions were released

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

in 1901, at the time of the Boer War, became a rallying call to a nation.

Elgar was delighted.

"I look on the composer's job," he once said, "as the old troubadours did.

"In those days, it was no disgrace

"for a man to be turned on to step in front of an army

"and inspire them with a song.

"For my part, I know that there are a lot of people

"who like to celebrate events with music.

"To these people, I have given tunes."

(I ELGAR: "Land of Hope and Glory")

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

He was proud of his marches.

The words, however, were not his and he disapproved of them.

They were too jingoistic

and there was to come a time when Elgar could no longer bear

what had virtually become a second national anthem.

There was a terrible irony

in having a march written in the dashing, glinting days of 1900,

used as a battle hymn against a nation he loved so much.

Used, almost as an accompaniment,

to the growing horror of the First World War.

(I ELGAR: "Land of Hope and Glory")

As the gates of Armageddon opened in France,

Elgar, too old to serve, left London for Sussex,

and turned to chamber music, to sonatas and quintets.

Nothing, however, could sever the public's association of Elgar

with his Boer War marching song,

and the irony, to a man who had sensed the disaster to come and felt its impact,

became abominable.

(Cheering)

The relief of the Armistice was not shared by Elgar.

During the early fighting, he'd written various patriotic pieces,

but fewer and fewer as the war dragged on.

Now, in 1918, Laurence Binyon invited him to write an anthem for peace.

He refused point-blank.

Official music had become an abomination.

He had rented a cottage in the middle of a wood,

and in 1919, he put all his sadness and his desolation into a cello concerto,

his last great work.

(I ELGAR: "Cello Concerto, First Movement - Moderato")

In 1920, came the deepest grief of all:

the death, quite suddenly, of his wife Alice.

(I BACH: "Fantasia and Fugue in C Minor, orchestrated by Elgar")

He put their London home in shrouds

and lived in a corner of the house.

He buried all his honours in his wife's coffin. He composed nothing,

his only musical activity being to arrange a Bach organ work

for full orchestra.

He turned, now, not to chemistry but to biology,

kept three microscopes on an unused billiard table,

and got some kind of solace from the cold and abstract patterns

of life, thus revealed.

(Tannoy) J“ Land of hope and glory

J“ Mother of the free... J“

In 1924, he was called on to conduct his music

at the royal opening of the Wembley Empire Exhibition.

J“ ...are born of thee... J“

Elgar had planned to perform some new music,

"But the King," he wrote, "insists on Lana' of Hope.

"Music is dying fast in this country.

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

The whole clatter and bang of Wembley he found intolerable.

(I ELGAR: "Land of Hope and Glory")

He described his feelings during the royal parade:

"I was in the middle of the enormous stadium,

"surrounded by all the ridiculous court programme,

"aeroplanes circling over, loudspeakers, amplifiers,

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

(Contralto) ♪ God, who made thee mighty

J“ Make thee mightier yet

(Children) J“ God, who made thee mighty

J“ Make thee mightier yet...

(Bass) ♪ God, who made thee mighty

J“ Make thee mightier yet J“

(I ELGAR: "lntr0ducti0n and Allegro")

Elgar could stand it no more,

and this time he left London for good, driving back to the Malvern Hills,

alone, except for his dogs.

He'd loved dogs all his life.

His wife had hated them and wouldn't allow one in the house.

Now, he was never without them. They were his only companions.

(Birdsong)

Elgar had gone back to his roots, to Worcester,

and there he lived out his life, as a country gentleman.

Further honours came his way.

He'd become a member of the Order of Merit

and had been honoured by a dozen universities.

Now, he was a baronet and Master of the King's Music.

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

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

it was, wrote Constance Lambert,

"as if one of the classical composers had appeared

"to conduct a work of another age".

The times were out of joint, out of sympathy,

with the full-blooded romantic and the drum-beating patriot

and the religious visionary, and Elgar had been all three.

In the year he wrote his first symphony,

it had been played 82 times, all over the world,

from Saint Petersburg to Pennsylvania,

and he probably was the last great composer to be in touch with the people.

But now, the rare Elgar concerts were half-empty.

In the early thirties, when he was rising 75,

Elgar took on a brief new lease of life.

There was a lively friendship with Bernard Shaw

and the excitement of working once more, on his violin concerto,

with a young Yehudi Menuhin.

He began sketches for a new symphony and an opera.

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

took their final grip

and he was forced to take to this bed.

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

and the Malvern Hills beyond.

There, he lay for hour after hour,

listening to recordings of his music

and, according to his own account,

drifting through his memories

in search of those moments and people and places

that had brought him happiness and fulfillment.

(I ELGAR: "Nimr0d")