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Edward Elgar (1857—1934)

1. Born in Lower Broadheath near Worcester on June 2, 1857, Edward William Elgar came into the world in a countryside idyll which went on to dominate his creativity for the rest of his life.

2. Elgar became something of a musical oddity, regularly accompanying local groups and choirs, as well as making early forays into composing. It was not the most lucrative path and he spent some time working at a law firm to make ends meet.

3. One of Elgar’s most popular works, the Enigma Variations from 1899, is also his most mysterious. Each of the fourteen variations has a cryptic subtitle which relates to a particular person or animal in Elgar’s life, including his wife, his publisher, and various friends and students.

4. Elgar met the woman who was to become his wife, Caroline Alice Roberts, in 1886. She was from good stock and very wealthy, and was to become a hugely dominant force behind Elgar’s creativity. He dedicated several pieces to her, including Salut d’Amour, which he composed as an engagement present.

5. The eleventh variation in the Enigma Variations supposedly depicts George Sinclair’s (who at the time was organist at Hereford Cathedral) bulldog, Dan, after it fell into the River Wye.

6. In 1923 Elgar made a little-documented trip to South America, where he embarked upon a cruise of the Amazon river. The event was fictionalised in James Hamilton-Patterson’s novel Gerontius, which makes a rather fanciful fist of the whole episode.

7. One of the masterpieces of the modern cello repertoire, it is intriguing Elgar’s Cello concerto was not widely performed until Jacqueline Du Pré got hold of it in 1965. The premiere recording was made by Beatrice Harrison, with Elgar himself conducting in 1920.

8. Elgar was one of the first composers to fully embrace recorded music. He regularly teamed up with the team at HMV to make premiere recordings of his works, including the Enigma Variations, the Cello Concerto, and Symphonic Study “Falstaff.”

9. As well as being behind some of the most beloved English music of all time, Sir Edward Elgar was also a keen amateur chemist. He would happily spend hours in his shed tinkering away at little experiments, but the culmination was most certainly his invention of the Elgar Sulphuretted Hydrogen Apparatus, a device for synthesizing hydrogen sulfide which briefly went into production.

10. Inoperable colorectal cancer was discovered during an operation on October 8, 1933. He told his consulting doctor, Arthur Thomson, he had no faith in an afterlife, “I believe there is nothing but complete oblivion.” Elgar died on February 23, 1934 and was buried next to his wife at St. Wulstan’s Roman Catholic Church in Little Malvern.