Elgar: Emergence and Success

The winter here has been truly awful, wrote Elgar. The fogs are terrifying and make us very ill. Yesterday all day and today until noon 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 February, 1890. I could have died with the cold. There was only one thing to do: cut their losses. The 'house to let' sign went up on their home in West Kensington, and the Elgar, disillusioned and despondent, went back to Worcestershire. 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 if 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 reestablished 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 easier to give up. The music began to flow; and in a Serenade for Strings written to celebrate their third wedding anniversary, it was a new and richer stream of melody than ever. He composed the Serenade for Strings and 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.' Four years later - he was 39 by now -public recognition still hadn't come his way: is 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 for some reason this march, now virtually forgotten, immediately caught the public imagination in that Jubilee year and everywhere it reflected the buoyant high spirits and the appetite for imperial glory that were very much part to their Elgar's complicated makeup. 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.