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?

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.

Fritz Theodore Albert Delius was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, into a family of wealthy wool merchants. The Delius’ originally came from Bielefeld, Westphalia, where one of the previous Burgermeisters, Ernst Frederick Delius (Fritz’s grandfather), was a retired army officer who had served proudly under Blucher during the Napoleonic Wars.

In the early 1850s three of the old soldier’s sons moved to Manchester, England, where the thriving wool industry gave great opportunities. The Delius brothers were successful from the start, with Julius opening a second factory in Bradford in 1855, where he also took out naturalization papers to become a British citizen. The following year he returned to Westphalia to marry Elise Kronig, who was fifteen years his junior, and the beautiful piano playing daughter of another prosperous Bielefeld family.

Fritz ( Delius anglicised his name to Frederick in 1902), was Elise’s fourth child and grew up in the company of two brothers and nine sisters. Although two of Elise’s children had died in infancy the Delius’ home, “Claremont”, was a happy, music filled house just a few minutes walk from Bradford Grammar School where Delius spent some of the unhappiest years of his life.

Delius’s father, a tough no-nonsense businessman (with an accent that kept slipping from upper-class English, with a hint of aristocratic German, to broad Yorkshire, as would his son’s in later life) was a great music lover and an early financial supporter of Manchester’s Halle Orchestra. He encouraged his son’s musical talents; but under no circumstances would he countenance Delius taking-up music as a career, insisting his son join the family wool business. But as a twelve year old schoolboy - and an already accomplished violinist and pianist - Fritz Delius knew his destiny was in music, whatever his father might think, or say.

As Fritz settled down to his first term at grammar school, a couple of hundred miles to the south of Bradford, in the spa town of Cheltenham, another accomplished pianist and music teacher, Adolph Von Holst, was pacing the parlour of his Georgian townhouse awaiting the birth of his first child.

Gustavius Theodore Von Holst was born on the 21st September 1874, and was of Russian, Swedish, German, Spanish, and possibly Irish extraction — his mother’s Spanish great-great- grandmother had once been abducted by an Irish peer, and forced to live in Ireland. Holst’s grandfather, also called Gustavius, had taught the harp, and his great grandfather, Matthias, had been a pianist and composer at the Russian Imperial Court.

When Holst was eight his beloved mother suddenly died, leaving him, and his younger brother (the actor Ernest Cossart, who had a long career in Hollywood playing portly butlers) to be brought-up by his father’s sister Nora, a tearful and romantic woman who had once strewn flowers at the feet of Franz Liszt. But although Holst suffered with congenitally weak eyes, and severe asthma, his life at 4 Clarence Road does seem to have been a happy one with, naturally enough, Adolph teaching the young Gustav to play the piano and violin.

In 1885, with his father newly re-married, the 12 year old Holst entered Cheltenham Grammar School where he excelled in musical theory and composition. But due to the onset of neuritis in his right arm and hand he failed to get the much hoped for scholarship to the Royal College of Music.

Seven years later at the age of 18 ( when the 35 year old Edward Elgar was writing his first oratorio The Black Knight and the 30 year old Fritz Delius had already seen his first opera, Irmelin, performed the previous year) the disappointed, rather gaunt and thickly bespectacled Gustav Holst cycled the few miles to the Cotswold village of Wyck Rissington to take up the post of organist and choirmaster at the local church.

Holst took his job seriously and his reputation soon spread. Within a few months he’d moved from Wyck Rissington to nearby Bourton-on-the-Water as Choirmaster of that town’s Choral Society. But all the time Holst’s neuritis was getting worse making it almost impossible for him to play the organ and conduct. Perhaps as some kind of therapy Holst often took himself off into the Cotswold Hills where, finding a quiet spot, he wrote music, lots of music. It paid off.

The year 1893 saw Holst’s first composition, the operetta, Lansdowne Castle, performed at the Cheltenham Corn Exchange. His father was so impressed that he borrowed the £90 required to finally send his son to the Royal College of Music.

A reinvigorated Holst was in his element at the RCM and studied composition with the Irish composer Sir Charles Villiers Standford (he even learned the trombone, an instrument which became his musical bread and butter some years later), and met the young Ralph Vaughan-Williams, with whom he had a long, and mutually supportive friendship.

Holst graduated from the RCM in 1898 and took a job playing trombone with the orchestra of the Carl Rosa Opera. In the same year Edward Elgar composed one of his most loved and enduring pieces, the Enigma Variations.