Word: elgar
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...parallels of such creative longevity. Yet Ralph Vaughan Williams went on to write three more symphonies. King George V gave him the Order of Merit in 1935, but he declined many other honors, knighthood included. He may not have attained the wide popularity of that musical Kipling, Sir Edward Elgar, but international professionals respected Vaughan Williams as the more important musician. And all England loved him as Sir Malcolm Sargent described him: "A darling fat man walking about clasping a bowler hat to his tummy and wearing the widest trousers in Christendom...
...Elgar might have remained an obscure provincial composer if he had not been encouraged by his wife, a general's daughter. At 43 he won fame at last with his thunderous oratorio, The Dream of Gerontius. As Edwardian England wandered toward World War I, his reputation rose on a great wave of public nostalgia...
Beef & Beer. Elgar became Master of the King's Musick. He fitted the public picture of clubman and country squire, complimented himself that he neither looked nor dressed like an artist. It was this pompous Elgar who turned out the first Pomp and Circumstance march (its trio is also known as "Land of Hope and Glory"), along with The Crown of India, The Banner of St. George, Imperial March -all marked by bombast, contrived orchestral climaxes, syrupy sentiment. "I want to write something as typically and thoroughly English as roast beef and beer," Elgar said, and he succeeded...
...there was another, less roast-beefy side to Elgar ("I must go out and buy some strychnine," he said in a moment of self-criticism), and from that side came his best music-The Dream of Gerontius, Enigma Variations, the Falstaff symphonic poem, his two symphonies. Such pieces have few of Elgar's faults and most of his virtues: the imaginative orchestration, the mystical harmonies, the broad, marching orchestral drive, and the peaceful lyrical passages, which rise and fall as gently as the rolling English countryside Elgar used to roam for inspiration...
...Most of Elgar's works have vanished from the repertory and the minds of audiences as completely as the faraway world they echoed. But his better compositions still speak for the England of fields and hedgerows as surely as the martial pieces spoke for the fading empire...