Death of Elgar

No soldiers paraded, no trumpets blared, no drums rolled out an elegy. But throughout the Western World last week a mighty marching tune reverberated. Sir Edward Elgar, 76, was dead in Worcester, England. He was Britain's foremost composer. Master of the King's Musick. His Pomp and Circumstance was practically a national anthem.* But as he lay dying from an abdominal operation last autumn. Sir Edward had made his daughter promise not to give him a pompish London funeral. He had grown up in Worcester and in Worcester he had chosen to end his days. He never posed as a great composer. At the last he was a square-shouldered, square-mustachioed old man who might have been taken for a retired army officer and who liked to shock his friends by saying that he preferred a good horse race to a concert any day.

Worcester first heard Edward Elgar's music but did little to encourage him. Nor did England, until after Europe had approved him. Nor did Edward Elgar's father, who, in spite of being the town's best organist, had to keep a music shop to eke out a living for his seven children. Elgar's early talent was extraordinary. He learned to play the organ by watching his father Sunday mornings, taught himself the bassoon well enough to play in local festivals. But Father Elgar was not impressed. He set the boy to work in a law office but Elgar soon walked out, announcing that he preferred to earn his living as a violin teacher. His first steady job was as orchestra leader in the County Lunatic Asylum.

Elgar's fame as a composer reached London by way of Germany. The Dream of Gerontius had been given in the provinces but no one thought to call it a masterpiece until Conductor Hans Richter presented it in Duesseldorf and Richard Strauss acclaimed it. The Enigma Variations, Elgar's best-known symphonic work, was Richter's piece de resistance when he toured England in 1899. Five years later Elgar was knighted and the new King Edward pronounced Pomp and Circumstance "a very fine air."

The world has agreed with King Edward. Cinema audiences hear it with half the British newsreels. Noel Coward made it the theme tune of his Cavalcade (TIME, Jan. 16, 1933). And though Sir Edward tired of it (he omits it from the list of his compositions in British Who's Who) Pomp and Circumstance has the lusty. red-blooded quality which characterizes the best of Elgar's music. When he was recognized by the throne, Elgar started writing too much occasional music. He celebrated King George's coronation, his visit to India in 1912, his recovery from pneumonia in 1929. But having found an important native composer. England never stopped praising him, rated him a worthy successor of Beethoven and Brahms.

*Britishers sing part of Pomp and Circumstance as a patriotic hymn. It starts:

Land of Hope and Glory,

Mother of the Free, How shall we extol thee,

Who are born of thee?

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