Edward elgar composer biography for kids

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English composer (1857–1934)

"Elgar" redirects here. Not to be confused with Edward Elgar Publishing. For other uses, see Elgar (disambiguation).

Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet, OM, GCVO (; 2 June 1857 – 23 February 1934) was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, concertos for violin and cello, and two symphonies. He also composed choral works, including The Dream of Gerontius, chamber music and songs. He was appointed Master of the King's Musick in 1924.

Although Elgar is often regarded as a typically English composer, most of his musical influences were not from England but from continental Europe. He felt himself to be an outsider, not only musically, but socially. In musical circles dominated by academics, he was a self-taught composer; in Protestant Britain, his Roman Catholicism was regarded with suspicion in some quarters; and in the class-conscious society of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, he was acutely sensitive about his humble origins even after he achieved recognition. He nevertheless married the daughter of a senior British Army officer. She inspired him both musically and socially, but he struggled to achieve success until his forties, when after a series of moderately successful works his Enigma Variations (1899) became immediately popular in Britain and overseas. He followed the Variations with a choral work, The Dream of Gerontius (1900), based on a Roman Catholic text that caused some disquiet in the Anglican establishment in Britain, but it became, and has remained, a core repertory work in Britain and elsewhere. His later full-length religious choral works were well received but have not entered the regular repertory.

In his fifties, Elgar composed a symphony and a violin concerto t

Edward William Elgar was born on June 2 1987 in Lower Broadheath, a small village near Worcester, England and was the fourth of seven children. His father William was a piano tuner by trade and owned a music store where he sold sheet music and musical instruments, as well as being a professional violinist. His mother Ann had a keen interest in the arts and encouraged an interest in music within all of her children. Elgar spent many hours with his father, and by age 8 he was taking both piano and violin lessons, though he also taught himself to play other instruments. He began composing at the early age of 10 when he composed the music for a play written and performed by the Elgar children.

Elgar attendedthe Littleton House School until the age of 15, all the while studying every music book and organ instruction manual he could get his hands on. He learned German in the hope that when he finished school he would further his violin studies at Leipzig Conservatory but his father was unable to afford to send him. Elgar took up a position as a clerk at a local solicitor’s office which he disliked so spent every spare moment reading. It was around this time that he first performed in public as a violinist and organist.

After just a few short months at the solicitor’s office Elgar decided to embark upon a musical career, teaching piano and violin as well as helping out in his father’s store on occasion. Elgar and his father were both active members of the Worcester Glee Club and it was here that he accompanied the singers on violin, and composed works. It was at the Glee Club that Elgar received his first introduction to conducting. Adolf Pollitzer, from whom Elgar had received a small number of formal lessons earlier, encouraged the young man to pursue a career as a violin soloist but having heard the caliber of violin virtuosi at concerts in London Elgar felt his skill as a violinist was not good enough. As a result he abandoned the ide

Elgar was born on 2nd June 1857 at Broadheath, a village some three miles from the small city of Worcester in the English West Midlands. His father had a music shop in Worcester and tuned pianos.

Throughout the 1880s and the 1890s his experience grew and his style matured as he conducted and composed for local musical organisations. He also taught the violin and played the organ at St. George's Roman Catholic Church in Worcester.

In 1889 he married one of his pupils, Caroline Alice Roberts, daughter of the late Major- General Sir Henry Roberts who had enjoyed a distinguished career with the British army in India. She married Edward in opposition to her aunts and cousins (her mother had died in 1887) who considered that in marrying the son of a mere tradesman, a music teacher without prospects, she was marrying beneath herself. Nevertheless, Alice with determination and a dogged faith in Edward's emerging genius, played a vital part in the development of Elgar's career.

Slowly, and through such early works as Froissart (1890), the Imperial March (