Word: elgar
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...English-speaking peoples have yet to produce an enduring giant among composers. Edward William Elgar came close, though not very. Perhaps the best that can be said for him is that he admirably expressed his era. A discerning friend once wrote him: "You have translated Master Rudyard Kipling into music." For long, palmy decades, the world heard Elgar's brassy paddles chunking from Rangoon to Mandalay to Aldershot. When the trooper was on the tide, my boys, or when Tommy Atkins returned from defending dominion over palm and pine, or simply when the poor little street-bred people clustered...
This week a Britain that had receded a long way from Kipling paid affectionate if slightly embarrassed tribute to Sir Edward Elgar on the centennial of his birth. Extravagantly overpraised in his own day, Elgar is now in the shadows. The colder airs of Benjamin Britten rule Britannia- so much so that critics are taking pains to point out that Elgar, after all, was a skilled and inventive composer who opened a whole new musical tradition for his musically backward country...
Lace & Mendelssohn. The wonder of Elgar's career (he died in 1934 at 76) was not that he failed to become a great composer but that he accomplished as much as he did in the stale, lace-curtained musical atmosphere of mid-Victorian Worcester, where he grew up. The fresh gusts of new music blowing off the Continent never stirred Worcester, and Elgar did not venture as far as London until he was 22. His father was a church organist and sometime piano tuner, and Elgar was raised on warmed-over Mendelssohnian oratorios and cantatas. He played the bassoon...
PICASSO, by Frank Elgar and Robert Mailllard (315 pp.; Praeger; $5), is as ingenious as it is instructive. It follows the great Spaniard's endlessly experimental career from boyish leanings on older masters to the unpredictable individualist of old age who still defies simple analysis. The book does this in parallel critical and biographical commentaries that are expertly illustrated by the pictures appropriate to each page. A valuable attempt and this year's real bargain among art books...
...members of the small, invited Carnegie Hall audience wanted to break this year's Toscanini-broadcast rule against applause. Toscanini anticipated the thought, saw to it that the audience was given a special warning to stick to the rule. After the hour-long program of Debussy, Respighi and Elgar, he walked in silence, head bowed as usual, to his dressing room...