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’s church music is firmly rooted in his Roman Catholicism and in his early years as an organist. Yet, paradoxically, it is also inseparably associated with the great Anglican Cathedral of his native city of Worcester. There he played among the tombs as a child, there he listened awestruck to the anthems and motets, there he played the violin in the orchestra at concerts of the Three Choirs Festival and there he conducted his own mighty choral and orchestral works. Today his statue faces the cathedral and the street where his family lived before they moved out to the village of Broadheath and the cottage in which Elgar was born in 1857. Behind him is the High Street, where his father’s music shop once stood and where you would have found Elgar serving behind the counter, perhaps the day after he had conducted one of his own works somewhere in the city. He was ecumenical long before the word was fashionable, at home in the Anglican and Roman Catholic worlds, but not at ease. This recording contains two of the ceremonial settings of psalms he wrote for first performance in two of the nation’s shrines, Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral. But before they are mentioned more fully, we should turn to the acorns from which they grew, the smaller, devout works composed for the choir of St George’s Roman Catholic Church, Sansome Place, Worcester, where Elgar’s father William was organist from 1846 to 1884. Elgar himself was assistant organist from the mid-1870s and succeeded his father in 1885. The religious tensions which are a feature of Elgar’s complex personality may have begun with his father, who was not a Roman Catholic and detested any organized religion. Elgar’s mother was converted to the Catholic faith four years after her marriage and William was never fully reconciled to the idea—he threatened (jocularly, one presumes) to shoot his daughters if he caught them going to confession. Ironically, it was because of the Catholic church’s broadmindedness in employing him as organist at St George’s that all this occurred.

Before he started work in his father’s shop, Elgar at the age of fifteen worked for a year in the office of a solicitor, William Allen, a member of the congregation at George’s and a friend of the Elgar family, often visiting them at the Broadheath cottage where he would sing operatic arias to William Elgar’s accompaniment. When Allen died in 1887, Elgar composed a Pie Jesu to be sung by St George’s choir at the funeral, basing part of the melody on a Kyrie he had sketched the year before. In 1902 he rearranged it as Ave verum corpus and Novello’s published it as his Op 2 No 1. The flowing melody in G major is sung by the trebles, each verse being repeated like a litany by the full choir. There is a short coda, with antiphonal effects between trebles and tenors and altos and basses. In its devotional simplicity, it is characteristic of the young Elgar and has kept its place in the choral repertory. Already it shows how he could compose a melody that wraps itself round one’s heart. Typical, too, are the Ave Maria and Ave maris stella which constitute Nos 2 and 3 of Op 2. They were put together from fragments of anthems written for St George’s in 1887. In 1907 Elgar sent them to Novello’s with the admonition: ‘They are tender little plants, so treat them kindly whatever is their fate.’ The Ave Maria in particular has the direct intensity that one finds in Elgar’s larger choral works.

Source: Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Elgar)

Although originally scored for String Orchestra, I created this arrangement of the 3 Motets 1. Ave Verum - Jesu, Word of God Incarnate, 2. Ave Maria - Jesu, Lord of Life and Glory & 3. Ave maris stella - Jesu, Meek and Lowly (Opus 2 Nos. 1-3) for Winds (Flute, Oboe, French Horn & Bassoon) & Strings (2 Violins, Viola & Cello).