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 Opus 12) in E Major for Flute & Strings (2 Violins, Viola & Cello).