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.

This is the last of five posts on English music by Steve Newman:

In the years after leaving school Elgar continued his musical self-education and started teaching violin and piano to the daughters of local worthies. He joined the Worcester Amateur Instrumental Society as first violin, organised a wind band at a local lunatic asylum and, in 1882, fell in love with Helen Weaver, a beautiful seventeen year old whose parents owned a shoe shop in Worcester.

Helen, then studying music at the Leipzig Conservatory, was back in Worcester for the summer vacation and was immediately swept off her feet by the tall, beautifully spoken, pipe smoking, and heavily moustachioed Elgar.

In the winter of 1883 Elgar, after much opposition, managed to visit Helen in Leipzig, where they spent a few magical days together. On Helen’s final return from Germany the deepening affair continued, but in December 1885 Helen was suddenly, and unceremoniously shipped off to relatives in New Zealand. The reason given at the time is that she had a lung condition, but I believe it possible that Helen may have been pregnant with Elgar’s child; but whatever the reason the young Elgar was heart-broken and never really got over his young lover’s banishment.

Heart broken or not this first passionate encounter was, for Elgar, a defining moment in the creation of his very personal musical voice. As with the Malvern Hills the memory of his love affair with Helen Weaver is constantly to be heard in his music.

Similarly, in the music of Delius, we hear the musical throb of sub-tropical Florida.

After leaving school Delius’s father fully expected his son to enter the wool business, and on that assumption, and to teach him basic administration skills, sent him to Florida to run a family owned orange plantation.

Delius loved Florida but ignored the business intricacies of running an orange plantation completely choosing instead to listen to the Negro field workers sing spirituals, and in the evenings visit the bars and brothels in nearby Jacksonville. And it was probably there that he first contracted syphilis and possibly fathered a child. But what also came out of his stay was the first draft of the extraordinary Florida Suite (1888) which overflows with the structure, and swing, of the Negro spiritual.

At last Delius had found his musical voice and insisted his father send him to Leipzig to study. At first Julius would not budge, but eventually, after the persuasive interjection of the Norwegian composer Edvard Greig (a mountaineering friend of the young Delius) Julius finally gave in and, in 1886, sent the 26 year old Fred Delius to The Leipzig Conservatory to start his formal musical education.

The young Delius studied hard, but in the vacations he travelled widely in Europe and Scandinavia, and after graduating from Leipzig moved to Paris to live the life of a wealthy playboy who also had some rather unusual ideas about the sort of music he wanted to write.

After many love affairs he eventually settled down with the German painter Jelka Rosen, whom he married in 1903, moving to her house in Grez-sur-Loing where they lived for the rest of their lives.

That same year also saw Elgar’s The Apostles first performed in Birmingham, and Holst (now married to singer Isobel Harrison, and the Head of Music at the James Allen School For Girls in Dulwich) use every spare moment to compose a handful of operas (including the Sanskrit based Savitri), plus several choral and orchestral works.

Gustav’s daughter, Imogene - who was born in 1907 - studied with her father’s old friend Ralph Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music in the 1920s, later becoming a freelance musician and conductor. During WWII she helped organise, for the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts ( the forerunner of the Arts Council of Great Britain), hundreds of morale boosting musical events for the civilian population of Britain. After the war Benjamin Britten invited her to Aldeburgh in Suffolk to help him stage his opera, Gloriana. She immediately fell in love with the place (and if you’ve never been to Aldeburgh you are missing one of the delights of the Suffolk coast), bought a house and lived there for the rest of her life. She was the Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival from 1956 to 1977 and helped to establish the festival as an international event. She died in 1984.

In many ways marriage was the making of Holst, Delius and Elgar. Holst was now secure in a loving relationship. Delius enjoyed a sophisticated existence with a vivacious and outspoken painter whose own private income ensured he could continue to compose without distraction. Elgar also married rather well.

Caroline Alice Roberts was nine years older than Elgar, the daughter of a retired Indian Army Major General, with her own private income. She was tall, highly educated, socially well connected, and from the day she and Elgar married (May 8th 1889) was determined to make sure her husband’s genius was acknowledged and rewarded. It was the wisest move Elgar ever made and in the ten years following their marriage saw him compose the overture Froissart, the oratorios King Olaf, and Caractacus, The Imperial March for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, plus, and most importantly, the aforementioned, Enigma Variations. He also begin the troubled score of The Dream of Gerontius. In 1891 his daughter, Carice, was born, and in 1904 - with a symphony also in the bag, and aged only 47 - Elgar was knighted.

As with Delius and Holst, the First World War saw Elgar grieve bitterly for the loss of life in the trenches, and for him the almost unbearable lost innocence of his childhood. But out of these agonies he was finally able to create one his most personal musical statement, the Cello Concerto of 1918, which, apart from being, publicly at least, a paean for those lost lives, it may also have been a final outpouring of love for Helen Weaver.

Delius would make his own statement about The Great War in his heartbreaking Concerto For Violin and Cello, also written in 1918.

Holst - who served briefly in the Near East during the war - also poured out his musical heart in his 1917 Hymn of Jesus, written for voice and violin. This haunting piece of music was later recommended by Elgar (who never met Holst) for the Hull Festival of 1921.

1920 saw the death of Lady Elgar and a period thereafter that saw Sir Edward move house again and again, surround himself with dogs, become close friends with George Bernard Shaw, and suffer increasing amounts of back pain that was the onset of the cancer that eventually killed him.
The same year saw Delius confined to a wheelchair, become increasingly blind and angry, yet, over the next couple of years, write his own enigmatic and moving Cello Concerto. Delius was made a Companion of Honour in 1929.

Holst’s The Planets Suite was, by 1920, a concert hall favourite. The composer had also given up his teaching job to take up professorships at Reading University, and the Royal College of Music, with new works, such as the Choral Symphony and Egdon Heath, also spilling from his pen. He also had increasing amounts of severe stomach pain that was, in 1930, diagnosed as a duodenal ulcer.

In May 1933 Elgar flew to France to conduct the young Yehudi Menuhin in a performance of his Violin Concerto, which also gave him the chance to motor down to Grez-sur-Loing to met Delius again for only the third time in 30 years. They spent the afternoon in the garden talking about music, literature, and politics, and drinking Champagne. Elgar tried to explain what the flight from Croydon had felt like, in the end likening it to Delius’s music:

“Unexplainable, but always beautiful, like your music, Fred.”

By the winter of 1933, with his cancer now diagnosed, Elgar was confined to bed ( with his dogs) where he was able to listen to new HMV recordings of his music, and work on his 3rd Symphony, recently commissioned by the BBC. He died peacefully on the 23rd February 1934, aged 76.

In the spring of 1934 Holst was admitted to hospital in London for an operation to remove his duodenal ulcer. Although the operation was a success he died of a post-operative heart attack on May 25th, 1934, aged 59.

By the summer of 1934 Delius’s existence — and Jelka’s — was a misery, with local French doctors unable to do anything for the pain-stricken composer, who just screamed at them to get out and leave him alone. He would allow only his German male nurse, and Jelka, to touch him. Delius died on June 10th 1934, aged 72. Jelka died a year later.

Although Holst died at the height of his powers, and Elgar and Delius at the twilight of theirs, all three composers left powerfully defined musical paths that most British composers have, at sometime, and to their betterment, travelled.

Steve Newman