Sir Edward William Elgar (1857 – 1934) was an English
composer, many of whose works have entered the British
and international classical concert repertoire. Among
his best-known compositions are orchestral works
including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and
Circumstance Marches, concertos for violin and cello,
and two symphonies. He also composed choral works,
including The Dream of Gerontius, chamber music and
songs. He was appointed Master of the King's Musick in
1924.
Although Elga...(+)
Sir Edward William Elgar (1857 – 1934) was an English
composer, many of whose works have entered the British
and international classical concert repertoire. Among
his best-known compositions are orchestral works
including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and
Circumstance Marches, concertos for violin and cello,
and two symphonies. He also composed choral works,
including The Dream of Gerontius, chamber music and
songs. He was appointed Master of the King's Musick in
1924.
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 nevertheless married the
daughter of a senior British Army officer. She inspired
him both musically and socially, but 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. He followed the Variations with a choral
work, The Dream of Gerontius (1900), based on a Roman
Catholic text that caused some disquiet in the Anglican
establishment in Britain, but it became, and has
remained, a core repertory work in Britain and
elsewhere. His later full-length religious choral works
were well received but have not entered the regular
repertory.
Elgar began composing when still a child, and all his
life he drew on his early sketchbooks for themes and
inspiration. The habit of assembling his compositions,
even large-scale ones, from scraps of themes jotted
down randomly remained throughout his life. His early
adult works included violin and piano pieces, music for
the wind quintet in which he and his brother played
between 1878 and 1881, and music of many types for the
Powick Asylum band. Diana McVeagh in Grove's Dictionary
finds many embryonic Elgarian touches in these pieces,
but few of them are regularly played, except Salut
d'Amour and (as arranged decades later into The Wand of
Youth Suites) some of the childhood sketches. Elgar's
sole work of note during his first spell in London in
1889–91, the overture Froissart, was a
romantic-bravura piece, influenced by Mendelssohn and
Wagner, but also showing further Elgarian
characteristics. Orchestral works composed during the
subsequent years in Worcestershire include the Serenade
for Strings and Three Bavarian Dances. In this period
and later, Elgar wrote songs and part songs. W. H. Reed
expressed reservations about these pieces, but praised
the part song The Snow, for female voices, and Sea
Pictures, a cycle of five songs for contralto and
orchestra which remains in the repertory.
Salut d'Amour (Liebesgruß), Op. 12, is a musical work
composed by Edward Elgar in 1888, originally written
for violin and piano. He finished the piece in July
1888, when he was romantically involved with Caroline
Alice Roberts, and he called it "Liebesgruss" ('Love's
Greeting') because of Miss Roberts' fluency in German.
On their engagement she had already presented him with
a poem "The Wind at Dawn" which he set to music and,
when he returned home to London on 22 September from a
holiday at the house of his friend Dr. Charles Buck in
Settle, he gave her Salut d'Amour as an engagement
present.
It was published a year later by Schott & Co., a German
publisher, with offices in Mainz, London, Paris and
Brussels. The first published editions were for violin
and piano, piano solo, cello and piano, and for small
orchestra. Few copies were sold until Schott changed
the title to "Salut d'Amour" with Liebesgruss as a
sub-title, and the composer's name as 'Ed. Elgar'. The
French title, Elgar realised, would help the work to be
sold not only in France but in other European
countries.
"Salut d'amour" is one of Elgar's best-known works and
has inspired numerous arrangements for widely varying
instrumental combinations. There are also versions with
lyrics in different languages, for example the song
"Woo thou, Sweet Music" with words by A. C. Bunten, and
"Violer" (Pansies) in Swedish. Greystoke: The Legend of
Tarzan, Lord of the Apes based on Edgar Rice Burrough's
famous novel features "Salut d'amour" being played on a
gramophone by Belgian explorer Phillippe d'Arnot and a
band of British adventurers including the brutal hunter
Major Jack Downing
Source: Wikipedia
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salut_d%27Amour).
Although originally composed for Violin and Piano, I
created this Arrangement of "Salut d'Amour"
(Liebesgruß Op. 12) in E Major for Flute & Piano.
PARTITION