All language subtitles for Elgar.1962.1080p.Bluray.x264-GHOULS

(I ELGAR: "lntr0ducti0n and Allegro")

(Huw Wheldon) When Elgar was a boy,
he spent hours on his own,

riding on his father's pony,
along the ridges of the Malvern Hills.

Elgar was born in 1857,

in the shadow of the hills which were to
have such an influence on his music,

all through his life.

There was little enough in his
circumstances to suggest

the future Sir Edward Elgar,
Master of the King's Music.

He grew up in Worcester,

a stuffy enough place,
in those days.

A place for the rich and the well-to-do,

the Elgars were neither.

Their social status was clear:

they were a lower-middle-class family.

Elgar's father kept a little music shop
in the high street.

By trade, he was a piano tuner.

Elgar was almost entirely self-taught.

(I HAYDN: "Trumpet Concerto")

His teachers were the books and
instruments lying about in the shop.

He was, apparently, one of those people

to whom playing an instrument
came naturally.

He said, later,
that his knowledge of orchestration

was founded
on these childhood experiences.

(Bell tolls)

The family lived above the shop.

Father, Mother, and five children.
All musical.

They had musical evenings,
twice a week.

Elgar's first known composition
was a song he wrote for his sister Lucy

to sing on her 21st birthday.

He was 15.

He wrote the words as well as the music,

and it was called
The Language of Flowers.

(Woman)
J“ The rose is a sign of joy and love

J” Young blushing love
in its earliest dawn

J“ And the mildness that suits
the gentle dove

J“ From the myrtle's snowy flower is drawn

J“ And the mildness that suits
the gentle dove

J“ From the myrtle's snowy flower
is drawn J“

(Wheldon) He wrote music
for everybody in the household,

including a two-part fugue,
which he wrote for a lodger

who played the violin,
and for his brother Frank,

who played the oboe.

This was an academic exercise,

but there was no question of his going to
any academy or university,

and at 15 or 16,
he started to serve behind the counter

at his father's shop.

He became a high-spirited
and very boisterous young man,

much given to what he called japes:

dressing up and jumping out of trees
onto the backs of his friends, and so on.

(Choir) ♪ O, salutaris... J“

(Wheldon) On Sundays, he played the
organ at the Catholic church.

He was born and bred a Roman Catholic

and it was no accident that the motets
and anthems he wrote for this church

are the first works which revealed a note
of an independent musical mind

in the making.

J“ ...H0stia

J“ Da robur, fer auxilium

J“ Bella premunt

J“ Hostilia

J“ Da robur

♪ Fer auxilium

J“ Auxilium

(p Polka)

(Wheldon)
He also took up small-time conducting.

His first official conducting appointment

was with the band of
the local Powick Lunatic Asylum,

for whom he also wrote the music.

Elgar walked the three miles to the asylum,

twice a week, for seven years.

For every quadrille and polka
he was paid five shillings.

For accompaniment to the black-and-
white-minstrel songs then in fashion,

he got one and six.

Serious composing was still a dream.

By now, he was becoming
much in demand as a music teacher,

and what with that
and his bold good looks,

he cut quite a dashing figure.

With four friends,
he formed a serenading group.

Elgar wrote the music
and played the bassoon,

when they played,
either for their own amusement

or, in a mildly flirtatious way,
to young women of their acquaintance.

(I ELGAR: "Minuet")

(Music obscures speech)

(Wheldon) In 1886, when he was 29,

Elgar met the woman
who was to transform his life.

For ten years,
his horizon had been firmly bounded

by the Malvern Hills.

He was full of music
and full of ambition

but somehow lacked the drive
to cut himself loose.

Miss Roberts was to change all this.

Caroline Alice was her name

and she was a major general's daughter.

Eight years older than Elgar,

she'd taken lessons on the piano from him

and like many pupils before her,

she fell in love with him.

She'd been brought up in a family
dedicated to the ideal of service,

but hitherto, her life, though earnest,
had seemed purposeless.

Now, she'd found a cause,

and a worthy one at that.

She would marry Elgar
and make him a great composer.

(I ELGAR: "Salut d'Am0ur")

Her influence on Elgar's music
was immediate.

This piece ,5'a/uf dfi4mour,

was written by Elgar
as an engagement present for her.

(Orchestra plays Sa/uf dfi4mour)

"We rode up to the Beacon on donkeys,"
Elgar wrote on a postcard.

"Never have I been so happy."

"I must tell you,"
he wrote to another friend,

"what a dear, loving companion I have,
and how sweet everything seems

"and how understandable
existence seems to have grown."

(Wheldon)
It was a long and difficult courtship.

Alice had the hostility of her family
to contend with.

They disapproved violently
of her marrying this music teacher,

with his boisterous ways
and his dubious prospects,

who was, moreover, a tradesman's son
and a Roman Catholic.

Against all opposition,
they were finally married in 1889.

He was 32 and she was 40,

and she was immediately disinherited
by her family.

They spent their honeymoon placidly,
at Ventnor, on the Isle of Wight.

Elgar gave up all his teaching jobs
in Worcestershire

and, full of hopes for the future,
they set out for London.

(Clip-clop of hooves)

Their plan, Mrs Elgar's plan,

was to finish with music teaching
and concentrate on composing.

But London, in 1890, was not impressed
by Mr Elgar from Worcester.

At his wife's suggestion, he brought with
him a whole portfolio of compositions,

salon music mostly,
like Sa/uf dfi4mour,

and these he sent off
to a dozen different publishers.

There was little he could do
except sit back and wait,

and as the manuscripts were returned
with a deadening regularity,

their optimism slowly drained away.

It was an anxious time.

There was no income coming in
and they couldn't afford their lease.

Mrs Elgar was now pregnant

and couldn't conceal her anxiety
and depression from her diary.

All her plans were coming to nothing.

At long last, a chance came his way.

Elgar was invited to rehearse one of his
pieces with a big London orchestra.

If it was liked, it would be performed
at one of the promenade concerts,

which were, apparently, held,
in those days, at Covent Garden.

It was a turning point.

(Fast waltz)

(Wheldon)
Elgar arrived at the opera house,

but had to wait until the orchestra
had finished its routine rehearsal.

He'd already been waiting for some time

when an official came down
to speak to him.

It seemed that the great Sir Arthur Sullivan
had arrived unexpectedly

and wanted to run through a few things
with the orchestra.

So there was no question of
Mr Elgar's music being tried out.

He was really so sorry.
So very sorry.

He became ill as well as depressed.

He suffered a good deal
from a septic wisdom tooth

and his eyes began to give him trouble,
which was to last all his life.

He went to as many concerts as he could

and practised the violin
for many hours a day,

but recognition as a composer
did not come.

Desperate for work,
he advertised in the London press,

offering himself
as a teacher of violin and orchestration.

He didn't get a single reply.

Mrs Elgar was no happier
and she was forced to sell

some of her own bits and pieces
of personal jewellery.

It was a sacrifice
and it wasn't enough to keep them warm.

"The winter here has been truly awful,"
wrote Elgar.

"The fogs are terrifying
and make us very ill.

"Yesterday, all day,
and today until two,

"we've been in a sort of yellow darkness."

Mrs Elgar noted in her diary:

"This was the coldest day I have ever felt.

"It was the last day of 1890.

"I could have died with a cold."

(Wheldon) There was only one thing to do
and that was to cut their losses.

The "House To Let" sign went up
on their home in West Kensington

and the Elgars,
disillusioned and despondent,

went back to Worcestershire.

(I ELGAR: "lntr0ducti0n and Allegro")

There was no pony anymore,
but Elgar bought himself a bike,

and despite all setbacks,
almost certainly felt an enormous relief.

Elgar's head was still full of great
orchestral themes,

not one of which he'd, so far,
ever heard played.

"My idea is that there is music in the air.
Music all around me," he once said.

"I do all my composing in the open.
At home, all I have to do

"is write it down."

They re-established themselves in Malvern

and Elgar went back to teaching.

The long climb to recognition
began once more.

Life was dull, provincial, and frustrating,

teaching schoolgirls to play the violin

and conducting amateurs in poky choirs
and orchestras.

After the birth of their daughter,
his wife was always by his side.

She played the piano at his music lessons,
kept the accounts,

and neglected no occasion
to push her husband forward.

She was absolutely determined
that he should be a success.

While Elgar himself was full of doubt
about his chances of getting a hearing,

she remained
quietly and relentlessly persistent.

She wrote to music publishers,
corrected the proofs

of such little pieces
as he got accepted,

and even ruled out the music staves
on plain paper,

because they couldn't afford
the proper manuscript.

She forced him to work
where it would have been easy to give up.

The music began to flow
and 'm the Serenade for Strings,

written to celebrate
their third wedding anniversary,

it was a new and richer stream of melody
than ever before.

In the year that he composed
the Serenade for Strings

Elgar took a job as a violinist
at the Three Choirs Festival

because, he wrote in his diary,

"I could obtain no recognition
as a composer."

(Wheldon) Four years later,
and he was 39 by now,

public recognition still hadn't come.

His background, his lack of connections,
and his religion were all against him.

Perhaps it was his wife who suggested a
new line of attack, who knows?

But in the spring of 1897,

working, of all places, in a bell tent
that had belonged to his father-in-law,

the major general,

he composed an imperial march in honour
of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.

(P ELGAR: "imperial March")

For some reason, this march,
now virtually forgotten,

immediately caught the public imagination
in that jubilee year.

It was played here, there, and everywhere.

It reflected the buoyant high spirits
and the appetite for imperial glory

that were very much part
of Elgar's complicated make-up.

It was frankly popular music
and it matched the mood of the day.

The Imperial March was a success.

It brought a passing glory but brought
nothing in the way of hard cash.

Nevertheless, money or no money,
he went on composing.

He rented a little cottage
which looked out onto the Malvern Hills

and this was to be his powerhouse
for the next ten years.

Here he wrote Caracfacus
the Enigma Var/zfi/ans

and, 'm 19%, The Dream of Gerontius.

They went without fires for 12 months,
while he was composing it.

The text was a poem by Cardinal Newman,

which Elgar had been given
on his wedding day.

It tells of the death of Gerontius
and the experiences of his spirit,

on its way to his God.

Elgar was moved by it
to compose as never before.

"This is what I hear all day,"
he wrote in a letter.

"The trees are singing my music
or have I sung theirs?"

He worked fast,
always composing in the open air,

writing it down at night,

turning his mind from public pomp

towards the private agony and ecstasy
of a worldly soul in purgatory and beyond.

It was an intensely visionary and
an intensely Catholic work,

and Elgar was in no doubt
about its stature.

"This is the best of me," he wrote,
quoting Ruskin at the end of the score.

"For the rest, I ate, I drank,
I slept, I loved, I hated as another.

"My life was a vapour and is not,

"but this is what I saw and know.

"This, if anything of mine,

"is worth your memory."

(Tenor) J“ Sanctus

J“ Fortis

♪ Sanctus Deus

J“ De profundis

♪ Ore Xe

J“ Misere

J“ Judex meus

♪ Moms, moms

J” In discrimine... ♪

"This, if anything, is worth your memory,"
he'd said.

But the first performance of Geronf/us
was a disaster.

"I have worked hard for 40 years

"and at the last, Providence denies me
a decent hearing of my work."

(Wheldon) It was left to Germany
and the Germans to confirm

what Mrs Elgar had been saying
for 12 years.

England had a great composer.

Elgar's music was suddenly discovered
by the famous German conductor

Hans Richter.

Geronf/us was performed at Dusseldorf

in the presence
of the composer and his wife.

A terrific German enthusiasm
suddenly flared up,

culminating in a speech
by Richard Strauss, the composer,

who hailed Elgar as
the first modern genius of English music.

The Elgars
were inveterate postcard-writers

and their postcards
to their daughter at home

told of triumph after triumph.

"Most splendid evening. Beautiful
performance received with rapture."

"Father shouted for again and again."

"So glad to have your letter.
Weather dreadful."

"A great dinner here today and a great
supper during the festival this evening."

"At rehearsal, they cheered and cheered.
Wish you were here. Much love."

"Delighted to tell you,
performance glorious."

"Last evening, the audience was quite
astounded. I am so thankful.

"We had a delightful supper party.
Not back until one-thirty."

At last, Elgar had arrived,
and with a bang.

But only in Germany.

(P ELGAR: "Enigma Variations - Theme")

(Wheldon) Back home, with his daughter,
Elgar took up kite-flying

and, as usual, went headlong
into a new hobby.

His friends were worried about his career,

but he was to confound them
by using their very doubts and worries,

their personal characters, as material for
a set of variations on an original theme

and it was these Enigma Variations
that finally got him recognised in England.

The character of Caroline Alice, his wife,
inspired the first of the variations.

Richard Arnold, son of Matthew Arnold,

solemn and witty, by turns,
provided another,

as did Basil Nevinson, cello player
and devoted friend of the composer.

A bulldog belonging to the organist
of Hereford Cathedral

was the subject of a forth.

There were 13, all told, but the character
which emerged most strongly throughout,

the key to the enigma, perhaps,

was Edward Elgar himself,
confident and masterful.

(P ELGAR: "Enigma Variations
- Finale: Allegro - E.D.U.")

(I ELGAR: "Pomp and Circumstance
March No. 1")

(Wheldon) What had happened
so sensationally in Germany

was now happening in England.

Almost overnight, the unknown Mr Elgar
became the great Sir Edward Elgar.

Within three years, he was firmly
established as a major international figure.

His portrait was hung in Windsor Castle,
he hobnobbed with kings.

The great roll call of honour started.

He was to be honoured by universities,
academies, and states all over the world.

"He deserves all these honours,"
wrote Sir Hubert Parry.

"In his music, he has reached
to the hearts of the people."

(I ELGAR: "Pomp and Circumstance
March No. 1")

"The triumph is yours as well as his,"
Elgar's nearest friend told Lady Elgar.

On the face of it, she now had
all that she wanted.

From their big new house in Hereford,

Elgar could live the life
of a country gentleman.

But success having come,
Elgar was not happy.

Behind the facade of new prosperity,

there was a constant worry about money.

The house, as usual,
was bigger than they could afford.

His illnesses became chronic and his
inspiration came only in fits and starts.

"I see nothing in the future,"
he wrote, "but a black stone wall

"against which I am longing
to dash my head."

To his wife, he talked,
sometimes, of suicide.

By turns, boisterous and lugubrious,
impulsive and reserved,

he drew apart from the world.

One extraordinary method of withdrawal,
this time, was into a new hobby,

a sort of do-it-yourself chemistry.

He tried to make a new kind of soap
and actually did invent

and take out a patent
for a thing called

the Elgar Sulphuretted Hydrogen
Apparatus.

(Gurgliflg)

(Explosion)

Yet these were the years
of Elgar's finest works.

The symphoxfles, the violin concerto,
Falstaff, and the rest.

Side by side with these schoolboy pranks
and black despairs,

there was a deep faith in humanity.

"There is no programme in my music,"
he said, "beyond a wide experience

"of human life. With a great charity and
love, and a massive hope in the future."

Three years later, in 1910,
he was much less hopeful.

The period was opulent,
but he'd become anxious and uneasy.

"These times are cruel and gloomy."

He'd come to see himself, increasingly,
as a kind of Poet Laureate of music,

and in his second symphony,
he'd originally set out

to celebrate the idea of monarchy.

But with the death of Edward VII
and his own mounting feelings of anxiety,

it became an elegy,
charged with what WB Yeats called

"Elgar's heroic melancholy".

An elegy for the passing of an age...
and a warning.

It was as if he sensed
disaster in the air.

"We walk," he said, "like ghosts".

(P ELGAR: "Symphony No. 2")

(I ELGAR: "Pomp and Circumstance
March No. 2")

(Wheldon) In 1914,
the tensions were released

and a song which Elgar had written,
in one of his popular, exuberant moods,

in 1901, at the time of the Boer War,
became a rallying call to a nation.

Elgar was delighted.

"I look on the composer's job," he once
said, "as the old troubadours did.

"In those days, it was no disgrace

"for a man to be turned on to step
in front of an army

"and inspire them with a song.

"For my part,
I know that there are a lot of people

"who like to celebrate events with music.

"To these people,
I have given tunes."

(I ELGAR: "Land of Hope and Glory")

"A tune like this only comes
once in a lifetime," he once said.

He was proud of his marches.

The words, however, were not his
and he disapproved of them.

They were too jingoistic

and there was to come a time
when Elgar could no longer bear

what had virtually become
a second national anthem.

There was a terrible irony

in having a march written in the dashing,
glinting days of 1900,

used as a battle hymn against
a nation he loved so much.

Used, almost as an accompaniment,

to the growing horror
of the First World War.

(I ELGAR: "Land of Hope and Glory")

As the gates of Armageddon
opened in France,

Elgar, too old to serve,
left London for Sussex,

and turned to chamber music,
to sonatas and quintets.

Nothing, however, could sever
the public's association of Elgar

with his Boer War marching song,

and the irony, to a man who had sensed
the disaster to come and felt its impact,

became abominable.

(Cheering)

The relief of the Armistice
was not shared by Elgar.

During the early fighting,
he'd written various patriotic pieces,

but fewer and fewer
as the war dragged on.

Now, in 1918, Laurence Binyon
invited him to write an anthem for peace.

He refused point-blank.

Official music had become
an abomination.

He had rented a cottage
in the middle of a wood,

and in 1919, he put all his sadness
and his desolation into a cello concerto,

his last great work.

(I ELGAR: "Cello Concerto,
First Movement - Moderato")

In 1920, came the deepest grief of all:

the death, quite suddenly,
of his wife Alice.

(I BACH: "Fantasia and Fugue in C Minor,
orchestrated by Elgar")

He put their London home in shrouds

and lived in a corner of the house.

He buried all his honours in
his wife's coffin. He composed nothing,

his only musical activity being
to arrange a Bach organ work

for full orchestra.

He turned, now,
not to chemistry but to biology,

kept three microscopes
on an unused billiard table,

and got some kind of solace
from the cold and abstract patterns

of life, thus revealed.

(Tannoy) J“ Land of hope and glory

J“ Mother of the free... J“

In 1924, he was called on
to conduct his music

at the royal opening
of the Wembley Empire Exhibition.

J“ ...are born of thee... J“

Elgar had planned
to perform some new music,

"But the King," he wrote,
"insists on Lana' of Hope.

"Music is dying fast in this country.

"Everything seems so hopelessly
and irredeemably vulgar at court."

The whole clatter and bang of Wembley
he found intolerable.

(I ELGAR: "Land of Hope and Glory")

He described his feelings
during the royal parade:

"I was in the middle
of the enormous stadium,

"surrounded by
all the ridiculous court programme,

"aeroplanes circling over,
loudspeakers, amplifiers,

"all mechanical and horrible, no soul,
no romance, and no imagination.

(Contralto) ♪ God, who made thee mighty

J“ Make thee mightier yet

(Children) J“ God, who made thee mighty

J“ Make thee mightier yet...

(Bass) ♪ God, who made thee mighty

J“ Make thee mightier yet J“

(I ELGAR: "lntr0ducti0n and Allegro")

Elgar could stand it no more,

and this time he left London for good,
driving back to the Malvern Hills,

alone, except for his dogs.

He'd loved dogs all his life.

His wife had hated them
and wouldn't allow one in the house.

Now, he was never without them.
They were his only companions.

(Birdsong)

Elgar had gone back to his roots,
to Worcester,

and there he lived out his life,
as a country gentleman.

Further honours came his way.

He'd become a member
of the Order of Merit

and had been honoured
by a dozen universities.

Now, he was a baronet
and Master of the King's Music.

But the cold wind of indifference blew over
his reputation with the public.

When he went, occasionally, to London,
to conduct a concert of his music,

it was, wrote Constance Lambert,

"as if one of the classical composers
had appeared

"to conduct a work of another age".

The times were out of joint,
out of sympathy,

with the full-blooded romantic
and the drum-beating patriot

and the religious visionary,
and Elgar had been all three.

In the year he wrote his first symphony,

it had been played 82 times,
all over the world,

from Saint Petersburg to Pennsylvania,

and he probably was the last great
composer to be in touch with the people.

But now, the rare Elgar concerts
were half-empty.

In the early thirties,
when he was rising 75,

Elgar took on a brief new lease of life.

There was a lively friendship
with Bernard Shaw

and the excitement of working once more,
on his violin concerto,

with a young Yehudi Menuhin.

He began sketches for a new symphony
and an opera.

But it was too late. The illnesses
which had haunted him all his life,

took their final grip

and he was forced to take to this bed.

He arranged it so that through the window
he could see Worcester Cathedral

and the Malvern Hills beyond.

There, he lay for hour after hour,

listening to recordings of his music

and, according to his own account,

drifting through his memories

in search of those moments
and people and places

that had brought him
happiness and fulfillment.

(I ELGAR: "Nimr0d")