Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet, OM, GCVO (2 June 1857 – 23 February 1934) was an English composer. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches and two symphonies. He also composed choral works, including The Dream of Gerontius, chamber music and songs.
About Edward Elgar in brief
Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet, OM, GCVO (2 June 1857 – 23 February 1934) was an English composer. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, concertos for violin and cello, and two symphonies. He also composed choral works, including The Dream of Gerontius, chamber music and songs. Although Elgar is often regarded as a typically English composer, most of his musical influences were not from England but from continental Europe. He felt himself to be an outsider, not only musically, but socially. 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. Elgar has been described as the first composer to take the gramophone seriously. Between 1914 and 1925, he conducted a series of acoustic recordings of his works. His music came, in his later years, to be seen as appealing chiefly to British audiences. His stock remained low for a generation after his death. It began to revive significantly in the 1960s, helped by new recordings of Elgar’s works. Some of the works have, in recent years, been taken up again internationally, but the music continues to be played more in Britain than elsewhere. Until he was fifteen, Elgar received a general education at Littleton House, near Worcester.
However, he wrote music that forty years later he rearranged with only minor changes as the suites titled The Wand of Youth. He was appointed Master of the King’s Musick in 1924. He died in 1934 and is buried at the Royal Academy of Music, London. He is survived by his wife, the former Ann Greening, and their seven children, all of whom are now in their 80s and 90s. The Elgar family are still living in Worcestershire, where they live in a house they built in the 19th century on the site of an 18th-century country house. The family still live in the same house and have a son and two daughters, both of whom were born in the 1970s and 80s. They have a daughter, Victoria, who was married to a senior British Army officer. She inspired him both musically and socially, but he struggled to achieve success until his forties. In his fifties he composed a symphony and a violin concerto that were immensely successful. His later full-length religious choral Works were well received but have not entered the regular repertory. He had a passionate love of the countryside and was interested in literature and literature and biographical taste for the countryside. 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, was raised in Dover and had been apprenticed to a London music publisher.
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