Elgar and the Malvern Hills

Each year, the BBC Proms offers a rich calendar of contemporary and classical music. Big hitters are celebrated alongside fresh new voices and pop culture treats: The 2025 edition even features a matinee performance of music from the Beeb’s hit reality show, The Traitors. But you always know what’s coming up when the Last Night of the Proms rolls round in the autumn: The Albert Hall and Hyde Park in party mode, awash with Union Jacks (and flags from many other nations) as the festival signs off for the season with a medley of patriotic favourites.

 

 

Since 1954, the show has concluded with Henry Wood’s “Fantasia on British Sea-songs” (including “Rule, Britannia!”) Edward Elgar’s “Land of Hope and Glory”, Hubert Parry’s “Jerusalem,” and the National Anthem – “Auld Lang Syne” was added later to make it even more of a knees-up.

The iconic final event in the Proms schedule has helped make “Land of Hope and Glory” the most enduringly popular of Elgar’s works as we approach the centenary of his death in 1934. Given the jingoistic nature of the piece, it may surprise some to know that the English composer was inspired more by the natural splendour of the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire than the might of the British Empire.

Elgar was born in 1857 in a modest cottage in Broadheath, a small village just outside Worcester. He was the fourth child of seven and the family soon moved to the city where his father, a piano tuner, opened a music shop. They lived above the store and Elgar displayed a natural affinity for music, self-teaching himself to play the various instruments he found lying about as he grew up. The family were also outsiders, Roman Catholic in a largely Protestant town, and Elgar’s faith would later contribute to some of his greatest masterworks.

Elgar grew into a rambunctious teenager but he remained smitten with music, writing his first known work, “The Language of Flowers” for his sister’s birthday when he was just 15. The organ pieces he wrote for the Catholic church displayed signs of an original and independently-minded composer of the future.

It took him a long time and a lot of soul searching to get there, though. His low social standing and lack of formal training meant that he had to make do with teaching music throughout his twenties, performing for polite society to make some extra income and even conducting a brass band at the local psychiatric hospital.

 

 

Things began to change in 1886 when Elgar, then 29 years old, took on a new student: Caroline Alice Roberts. They fell in love and she became the muse Edward needed - his achingly romantic “Salut D’Amour,” written as an engagement present, would become one of his best-loved pieces. They were the perfect team.  Edward the talent and the ambition, and Alice had the drive and determination to push him forward and accomplish his dream.

Alice was eight years older than Edward and she was the daughter of a stern military man. Her family bitterly opposed her marrying a humble music teacher, but she went against their wishes and found herself disinherited. This ill-feeling partly provided the impetus for the newlyweds to pack up everything and head to London to make a go of it.

Elgar’s first time in the capital was not successful, however. His compositions were repeatedly rejected by London publishers and money was running drastically low. The couple needed a break with a baby on the way, and soon. Edward became sick and depressed and they couldn’t afford to heat their home. Eventually, they gave up and headed back to Worcestershire.

Elgar returned to teaching, conducting, and performing to make ends meet. Despite his failure in London, it was a relief to be surrounded once again by beloved countryside. That might have spelled the end of his ambitions if it wasn’t for Alice, who encouraged him to carry on composing, even hand-drawing staves on plain pages for him because they couldn’t afford professionally-printed manuscript paper.

Alice’s support enabled Edward to quietly grow his reputation. His first major work, “Froissart,” debuted at the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester in 1890, and he gained further recognition with choral pieces such as “The Black Knight” and “King Olaf.” In the spring of 1897 he finally got his big break. In a departure from his usual compositions, he wrote an Imperial March to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. 

The piece struck a chord with the patriotic fervour of the occasion and it became a popular hit, although it yielded little in the way of riches for the composer. Nevertheless, the success enabled Elgar to rent a small cottage overlooking the Malvern Hills. It was here that he would spend the next 10 years creating some of his greatest works, including “Enigma Variations,” “Caractacus,” and the intensely spiritual “Dream of Gerontius.”

 

 

Elgar poured his soul into creating the dramatically operatic piece, which followed a dying man as his spirit ascended to Heaven. “This is what I hear all day,” Elgar wrote, flushed with inspiration while composing it, “The trees are singing my music, or have I sung theirs?” This was the one, he felt: “This, if anything, is worth your memory."

The premiere of “Gerontius” was, in Elgar’s own words, a “disaster.” Luckily, it found favour in Germany where it played to rapturous audiences in 1901. The composer was hailed as the first modern genius of English music by none other than Richard Strauss. The Elgars were treated as superstars, and Edward was compared favourably with the likes of Wagner and Liszt. International performances in Paris, Vienna, and New York followed, but it still found some resistance back home. The Roman Catholic themes rankled with some; it was banned from Gloucester cathedral and one of Elgar’s contemporaries harshly stated that the work “stinks of incense.”

“Dream of Gerontius” eventually acquired admiration in Britain, but it was “Enigma Variations” that gained Elgar the same kind of adulation in his home country as he had received in Germany. Famously, Elgar took inspiration from the personalities of his wife, friends, and even a bulldog to create 14 vignettes based on a variation on a theme, with “Nimrod” becoming perhaps the most recognisable to casual listeners. Intriguingly, the composer also teased the Enigma itself, a well-known melody that supposedly runs through the entire piece as a counterpoint to the main theme. Whatever it is, Elgar took the answer to his grave, and it remains a popular puzzle for scholars and music fans to this day.

Elgar suddenly found himself basking in the success he had yearned for and worked so hard to achieve, and he was lauded by critics and taken to the hearts of the British public. In 1901, he debuted the first two of his “Pomp and Circumstance Marches,” strident orchestral music that was met with “frantic” success. The first would become intrinsically linked with “Land of Hope and Glory,” a patriotic song written by A.C. Benson in 1902. The same year, Elgar incorporated it into his “Coronation Ode” to celebrate Edward VII’s ascension to the throne, forever cementing Elgar’s reputation as a composer of the establishment and the British Empire. Two years later, Elgar was knighted and a festival of his music was held at Covent Garden in his honour.

Elgar celebrated his newfound fame by buying a big new house in Hereford (Plâs Gwyn, pictured below) for his wife and daughter, but the composer was still not settled. Money remained an issue and he suffered from poor health and sporadic inspiration. 

 

 

He became depressed and withdrew from public life, privately confiding with Alice that he occasionally contemplated suicide. He tinkered with inventing and chemistry, but these uncertain years were also a period when he composed some of his most mature works including two symphonies, his violin concerto, and “Falstaff,” a symphonic poem portraying Shakespeare’s popular character.

“Land of Hope and Glory” took on new connotations with the outbreak of the Great War, becoming a rallying call for the nation as Britain declared war on Germany. Publicly, he declared his pride as the piece became more popular than ever, and wrote other patriotic pieces early in the conflict like “Carillon” and “A Song for Soldiers.” 

Privately, however, Elgar wished that it could be written with less jingoistic lyrics. The composer was a patriotic man, but his notion of patriotism was founded on humanity, inclusiveness, and cooperation rather than strident nationalism. He grew to despise the fact that “Land of Hope and Glory” had now become a battle hymn against the country that had welcomed him to its heart just 13 years earlier.

 

 

Elgar withdrew from public life again, consoling himself with writing sonatas and chamber pieces in a rented cottage in Sussex (Brinkwells, pictured above). By the time Armistice rolled around in 1918, he had become so disillusioned with his association with the war that he refused a commission to write an “Anthem for Peace.”

Now living in seclusion in the countryside once again, Elgar poured all his melancholy and regret into the final great work, “Cello Concerto in E Minor,” which received a disastrous premiere in 1919. More profound sadness was to come in the following year when Alice passed away after a brief battle with lung cancer aged 72.

Without the firm guiding hand of his wife, Elgar spent his solitary later years occupying himself with his hobbies and composing very little. He tinkered with his inventions, studied biology, went to the horse races, and later supported Wolverhampton Wanderers, the club for which he wrote the ditty “He Banged the Leather for the Goal.” In one of his more adventurous trips, he took a river voyage up the Amazon in 1923. 

Later, he was summoned to conduct at the royal opening of the Wembley Empire Exhibition. He saw it as an opportunity to showcase some new material, but the King only wanted to hear the hits including “Land of Hope and Glory,” leading Elgar to bemoan the vulgarity of English musical tastes.

 

 

But despite Elgar’s grief and disappointment, there was always the Malvern Hills. He left London behind for good and moved back to Worcestershire. He had disliked dogs in his earlier life, but he was now never without his faithful pooch at his side. In his younger years, he would explore the hills on horseback, donkey, or bicycle. Now as an old man, he hired a chauffeur to drive him around the countryside he loved so much. He received further honours including the Order of Merit, but his music fell out of favour with the British public towards the end of his life, who regarded it as outdated.

Elgar had a brief flurry of activity in his final years but ultimately his poor health took its toll and he became bed-ridden. He had it arranged so he could see the spires of Worcester cathedral and the hills of Malvern beyond from the window of his bedroom. Alone with his music and his memories, Elgar passed away aged 76.

 

Elgar’s music remained deeply unfashionable in the years after his death, but he received reappraisal in the 1960s as critics began to separate the bombastic excesses of his patriotic work from the more profound passages of his true masterpieces. 

Around the same time, Ken Russell directed a superb BBC documentary, Elgar (1962), a moving and quietly groundbreaking piece that took the unusual step (for the decade) of casting several actors to portray a historical figure at various stages of their life. It acted as a calling card for Russell and it is very well-behaved compared to his controversial later films, but it really takes flight in several sequences setting the Worcestershire landscape to the composer’s music. It also helped a younger generation of viewers appreciate Elgar’s work.

14 years later, Elgar’s “The Dream of Gerontius” provided the musical backdrop for Penda’s Fen, David Rudkin’s ambitious Play for Today TV film. Shot on location around the Malvern Hills, the peculiar tale of sexual and social awakening is accompanied by supernatural visions including King Penda and the spirit of Sir Edward Elgar himself.

Nowadays, Elgar is regarded as the most English of all British composers. He once wrote that music was in the air, and all one has to do is reach out and take as much of it as you need. That’s a beautiful idea to keep in mind as you walk in his footsteps in the Malvern Hills.