He wrote fourteen friends into fourteen variations and then said a further theme runs over the whole set that is never heard — a puzzle nobody has solved since.
Elgar was born in 1857 outside Worcester, where his father kept a music shop and played the church organ. He never attended a conservatory — the shop's stock was his library, he taught himself from it, and when at fifteen he wanted to study in Leipzig the family could not afford it. So he stayed: violinist in local orchestras, teacher, and for several years the man who wrote dance music for the band at the county lunatic asylum.
At thirty he married his pupil Caroline Alice, a general's daughter well above him socially; her family cut her off for it. She was the one who pushed him out — copying his scores, keeping the world off him, insisting he should be writing large works.
The Enigma Variations were premiered in 1899, when he was forty-two, and made him overnight the most important composer in England. The next dozen years were his peak: two symphonies, a violin concerto, a cello concerto, and the five Pomp and Circumstance marches.
Alice died in 1920 and he all but stopped. The remaining fourteen years left only scattered works and a great deal of recording — he was among the first composers to record his own music extensively, and those discs can still be heard. Late in life he said the music is in the air, and you simply take as much as you want. He died at Worcester in 1934.
Elgar's music tends to swell slowly: a phrase enters quietly, repeats, and each time is thickened a little and lifted a little, until the whole texture is ringing. He rarely detonates; he accumulates.
The second mark is a melody that leaps up a wide interval and then walks back down. The leap usually falls at the head of the phrase and sounds like a deep breath taken before speaking.
The third is harmony that turns corners mid-sentence. The music seems to be heading one way, a chord changes, and the colour goes with it; that sense of setting out cheerfully and arriving wistful is close to his invention in English music.
His marches are the famous part, but the best of those pieces is usually not the striding section — it is the place in the middle where everything suddenly softens.
