In this series of five posts, Steve Newman looks at three giants of English music: Elgar, Delius and Holst. The posts run consecutively:

In re-reading my previous piece about Sir Edward Elgar at Tiddington House I am reminded that 1934 saw not only Elgar’s death but also the deaths of Frederick Delius and Gustav Holst. There can be no doubt that with their deaths England and the world lost three of it’s most distinctive and emotional voices, and until the later recognition of Benjamin Britten, Michael Tippet, and William Walton, left only the wonderfully idiosyncratic Ralph Vaughan Williams - and more about him in the future - to represent English music.

Elgar, Delius, and Holst all came from very different social, professional, and academic backgrounds that ensured they would create music that is - one compared with other - wholly different in structure, yet pulsates with a similar richness of orchestration which, when combined with its often deep melancholia, can readily reduce even a casual listener to genuine tears. Just listen to ‘Venus‘ from Holst’s suite The Planets (1916); Delius’s ‘The Walk to the Paradise Garden’ from his opera A Village Romeo and Juliet (1901); and the final moments from Elgar’s oratorio The Dream of Gerontius (1900) to hear what I mean.

All three men were born in the socially turbulent second half of the 19th century - and into the ethos of self-advancement that went with it. Each was hugely influenced by German, Russian, and Scandinavian music; energised by the explosion in industry, science, art, and literature, and the heated debates that surrounded, for instance, Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Astrologically speaking (and the inspiration for Holst’s The Planets was astrological, not astronomical) the three composers were very different too, with Elgar a charming, yet depressive Gemini; Delius a taciturn and intellectual Aquarian; and Holst a humorous, workaholic Virgoan.

It is also one of those ‘what ifs’ of history that had penicillin been clinically available in 1934 Elgar might have had time to finish his 3rd Symphony, Holst complete his non-choral 1st Symphony and perhaps even allow Delius (although he had absolutely no trust in doctors, or drugs) to write, with the continuing help of Eric Fenby, even more of his minimalist and beautifully elegiac chamber music? Instead all three died within six months of each other and in a world increasingly dominated by military dictatorship, where music at best was a social distraction, and at worst, a soundtrack to destruction and mass murder. I feel our composers would have found the Second World War almost impossible to endure?