Edward William Elgar (June 2, 1857 - February 23, 1934) was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Although Elgar is often regarded as a typically English composer, most of his mus
Edward William Elgar (June 2, 1857 - February 23, 1934) was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. 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 musical circles dominated by academics, he was a self-taught composer; 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. He struggled to achieve success until his forties, when after a series of moderately successful works his Enigma Variations (1899) became immediately popular in Britain and overseas. 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. The introduction of the microphone in 1925 made far more accurate sound reproduction possible, and Elgar made new recordings of most of his major orchestral works. In his fifties, Elgar composed a symphony and a violin concerto that were immensely successful. His second symphony and his cello concerto did not gain immediate public popularity and took many years to achieve a regular place in the concert repertory of British orchestras. Elgar's music came, in his later years, to be seen as appealing chiefly to British audiences. Inoperable colorectal cancer was discovered during an operation in 1933. He died in1934 at the age of 76. Despite the fluctuating critical assessment of the various works over the years, Elgar's major works taken as a whole have in the 21st century recovered strongly from their neglect in the 1950s. No photographer credited, undated.
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