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 he is often regarded as a typically English composer, most of his musical influences were not from England but from continental Europe.

Elgar was contemptuous of folk music and had little interest in or respect for the early English composers, calling William Byrd and his contemporaries "museum pieces". Of later English composers, he regarded Purcell as the greatest, and he said that he had learned much of his own technique from studying Hubert Parry's writings. The continental composers who most influenced Elgar were Handel, Dvo?ák and, to some degree, Brahms. In Elgar's chromaticism, the influence of Wagner is apparent, but Elgar's individual style of orchestration owes much to the clarity of nineteenth-century French composers, Berlioz, Massenet, Saint-Saëns and, particularly, Delibes, whose music Elgar played and conducted at Worcester and greatly admired.

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.

Elgar’s greatest part-songs were written specifically for the competition festival movement. The course of his career and the growth of this movement show a remarkable similarity. In 1884 the twenty-seven-year-old Worcester musician, virtually unknown outside his local area, saw the first London performance of his music when August Manns gave the short orchestral piece Sevillana at the Crystal Palace. That same year John Spencer Curwen began a competition festival at Stratford in east London, and the following year Mary Wakefield began the Westmoreland Festival at Kendal. The next fifteen years saw steady rather than spectacular development but by the turn of the century Elgar was a national figure, having written a number of choral works and especially the ‘Enigma’ Variations (1899) and The Dream of Gerontius (1900). By that time, too, the importance and influence of the competition festival movement was widely accepted, and the larger meetings such as Morecambe warranted detailed coverage in The Musical Times and other journals. The first decade of this century represented the peak of success. Elgar was knighted in 1904; and that same year saw the foundation of a national umbrella organization, the Association of Musical Competition Festivals. In 1908 the premiere of Elgar’s First Symphony met with unprecedented acclaim; and there was by now so much coverage of competitions in The Musical Times that it was necessary to publish a supplement, entitled The Competition Festival Record. Musical commentators spoke of the ‘choral revival’ which was sweeping the country. By the outbreak of war in 1914 there had been a slight levelling off – a decline, even – for both composer and competitions which continued into the 1920s when flippancy, neo-classical cleverness and atonality were de rigueur in the musical establishment, and mass entertainments such as cinema and the gramophone sapped the strength of the choral societies.

In late 1907 the Elgars went to Rome for the winter. He was trying to write a symphony, although he was neither very well nor at peace with himself, and was constantly beset with requests for small-scale works. Alfred Littleton of Novello wanted ‘a marching-song for soldiers’; F G Edwards, editor of The Musical Times, asked for a setting of a hymn entitled How calmly the evening; and Elgar’s old friend Sinclair had requested a Christmas carol for the cathedral choir at Hereford. No wonder Elgar wrote to Frank Schuster: ‘I am trying to write music, but the bitterness is that it pays not at all & I must write & arrange what my soul loathes to permit me to write what you like & I like.’ Yet as well as completing all his commissions, he found time over Christmas 1907 to compose five of his finest part-songs – the four Opus 53 songs for mixed voice; and The Reveille (Op 54) for male voices. This last – a large-scale, impressive setting, lasting almost as long as the five Greek Anthology songs put together – had been commissioned by William McNaught. However, in view of his protestations to Schuster about wanting to get on with the real work of the symphony, it seems strange that he chose to spend time on four very elaborate and ambitious songs. It appears that he selected the words of the first three (by Tennyson, Byron and Shelley) and wrote the fourth – Owls – himself. The first song, There is Sweet Music, dedicated to Gorton, Elgar called ‘… a clinker & the best I have done’. It broke new ground by being written in two keys at once, the men’s part in G and the ladies’ in A flat, and it remains an extreme test of difficulty for a choir. Initially amateurs avoided it; when it was given its first public performance in the Open Choir class at the 1909 Morecambe Festival, only five choirs entered, instead of the usual twenty or so.

Source: AllMusic (https://www.allmusic.com/composition/songs-4-for-voice -piano-op-39-mc0002486201).

Although originally written for Voice (Mezzo-Soprano) and Piano, I created this Interpretation of "There is Sweet Music" from "Four Songs" (Op. 53 No. 1) for Winds (Flute, Oboe, French Horn & Bassoon) and Strings (2 Violins, Viola & Cello).