Edward William Elgar was born in Broadheath, to the west of Worcester, on the 2nd of June 1857. He was the fourth child of William and Anne Elgar. From the south facing window of the bedroom in which Edward was born can be seen the Malvern Hills, and if ever a geographical feature was to influence one composers work it would be these gently sloping hills. In virtually every phrase of Elgar’s music their mysticism, their rise and fall, their changing colour, is ever present.

Edward’s father, William, was a Dover man who moved to Worcester in 1841 to set-up a piano tuning business. This limped along until, in 1844, the Comptroller of the Household of the Queen Dowager, Adelaide (widow of William IV who lived close by in Witley Court) asked William Elgar to tune their many pianos. As a result Elgar senior was soon in demand by all the county families, with the resultant financial success enabling him to open a music shop in the centre of Worcester. And it was on those piano tuning outings with his father that Edward Elgar first came into contact with the nuts and bolts of music.

Edward’s mother, Anne Greening, the daughter of a Herefordshire farmer, was a tall and ruggedly attractive woman, with a passion for literature and music. She met William in 1848 when he was lodging in a Worcester Tavern. After a brief courtship they married and their life thereafter seems to have been a happy one, with the couple enjoying the musical life that flourished in Worcester. They even gave up their protestant beliefs so that William could become organist at St George’s Roman Catholic Church in Worcester.

The young Edward Elgar was surrounded by music, teaching himself to play the piano and violin. But his schooling, unlike Delius and Holst, does seem to have been somewhat desultory, with two years spent in a Catholic infant school, followed by two more at ‘The Miss Walsh Dame School’ in Worcester, and then, from the age of eleven to fifteen, at the Littleton House School ( with a compliment of just thirty boys) where the teacher, Francis Reeve, inspired the young Elgar with stories about Christ’s disciples, and how, as young men, they were probably “no cleverer than some of you here.” Which, as an observation and theme, would later appear in Elgar’s massive oratorio The Apostles.

The majority of Edward’s non-musical education therefore came from his mother, who taught her son the rudiments of mathematics and geography, and gave him a long and comprehensive reading list that, naturally, included The Bible and Shakespeare, but also Voltaire, Holinshead, Drayton, and Sidney, and by contrast, the hugely popular poetry of Mrs Hemans - whose poem, ‘Casabianca’, famously begins: “The boy stood on the burning deck…”. In later life Elgar took every opportunity to quote at length from that much lampooned poem.

The young Edward was a solitary, and introspective boy who spent hours sitting on the banks of the River Severn studying scores borrowed from his father’s shop. And if not on the riverbank he might be found high in the galleries of Worcester Cathedral listening to the rehearsals of the Worcester Festival Choral Society. Consequently Elgar was absorbing music as if it were the sun and the rain, and by the time Frederick Delius was born, on the 29th January 1862, music was Elgar’s first language.