On a particularly warm August evening in 1932 Sir Edward Elgar was to conduct his Symphony no 2 at a Queens Hall Proms concert. He was 73 and it would be his final appearance as a conductor in London.  Nearing the artists’ door pre-concert, Elgar was in jovial mood, excited by the large crowd building up, as he, with a small group of friends, strolled around the block to kill time before the performance.  His mood was further lifted when he heard strains of something deeply familiar being played by an itinerant fiddler. The music was his own Salut d’Amour written some 44 years before. As if playing a part in a Shakespeare play, the fiddler seemed not to know who was addressing him as change was jangled in readiness for a donation. Did he know what it was he was playing? asked the distinguished elderly gentleman; he did indeed, and he knew who had written it; Sir Edward Elgar. Turning away and towards the evening’s performance, a half crown was lobbed into the hat whilst the donor intimated, with some feeling, that this was more than the composer had ever made from the piece.

In the Elgar Society Edition volume 37, ‘Music for the violin’, there are more than 20 pieces for violin and piano along with various fragments and oddments. Almost all were written by their composer in different states of hope and expectation but almost all as a more or less unknown composer.  That is, almost all were written before the society of Edwardian England started to turn its attention favourably towards this self-educated lower middle-class boy from Worcester. Four of the pieces on this album - Salut d’Amour, La Capricieusse, Chanson de Nuit and Chanson de Matin fit this description. The outlier is the one called Sospiri, written in the first years of his gradual slide down the other side of celebrity. But even here some of the same dynamic is true.

In all of them to a greater or lesser extent, shimmers something bigger and deeper and more mysterious than what is immediately heard. The out-of-full-view presence below the surface is to some extent obscured by the glint of reflected sunshine. All could be said to be the embodiment of the three or four-minute popular Victorian trifles they claimed to be. The surface is indeed already in itself beautiful and pleasing.  But because we know the composer of these ‘slight’ works became the composer of symphonies and oratorios as well as the longest and most epic of concertos, we have a sort of carved out space beneath and around them into which they can expand. 

Elgar’s relationship with the violin is baked into so much of his music. He chose to number a Romance for violin and piano his opus 1. And though his playing days were over by the time he was 40, the violin remained for him a fertile opening to the world of youthful enthusiasms and tenderest feelings. Two examples come to my mind immediately: in his most unjustly overlooked orchestral piece ‘Falstaff’, he turns to the solo violin when the eponymous fat old knight dreams of his youth, just as in the first Symphony when he wanted to summon something of a golden summer’s day ‘down by the river’, it is again the solo violin he turns to.

When Elgar’s reputation was made, the violinist W H Reed became one of his closest friends, in many ways replacing the crucial relationship he had with August Jaeger who had died in 1909 Reed was leader of the LSO as well as a composer. He became a huge help to Elgar as he worked up the concerto, and later the Sonata and the later chamber music. The boyishness of their relationship is striking – on his arrival at the cottage in Sussex where Reed would watch the emergence of the Violin and Piano Sonata, the Piano Quintet and String Quartet, Alice Elgar took Reed aside and thanked him for answering the summons, as, ‘Edward needs somebody to play with’. Various escapades involving fishing, wasps’ nests and chopping wood lit up the days and with Reed around Elgar clearly felt he could bring back to life the fun and games he and a certain Charles Hayward had had mucking about in orchestras long before.  The young Elgar and Haywood had shared a desk on many occasions in Elgar’s days as a jobbing free-lance violinist. (Every violinist will know how crucial it is to have a shared sense of fun with the person sitting next to you on a desk -especially when the stresses of travel, muddy fields for those outdoor dates, far from ideal changing and eating arrangements and less than inspiring music or conducting can turn an unpromising gig into a delight.)

Reed remembers the ageing composer describing how he and Hayward had apparently ‘let into it’ as they attacked their work together on the front desk. Well yes…

“He would stand up to his full height and play an imaginary violin with the wildest abandon, singing some phrase out of one of the old pieces at the top of his voice, moving his imaginary bow about at incredible speed with a white-hot enthusiasm…The piece de resistance was when he imitated Wilhelmj, whom he had heard play the Air Hongrois by Ernst. From his account Wilhelmj must have had a colossal tone; and his attack on the opening tenth on the G sting must have been hair-raising. It excited Elgar to such an extent that he never forgot it; and when he showed me how it was done I felt thankful that he was content to perform upon an imaginary violin and not on mine; for the movement he made would have cut any ordinary violin in half…’

The defining moment with the violin as a career path came after young Elgar’s second series of lessons with the highly respected teacher Adolf Pollitzer in London in1884.  He had just heard the great August Wilhelmj playing for a second time – this time the Beethoven concerto, and the impression it created clearly made young Edward feel, despite all the hours of work he had poured into the enterprise, that he could never get near that kind of sound. 

He asked Pollitzer, ‘Shall I ever be really first-class?’… to which Pollitzer gave a somewhat hedging reply. Edward repeated his question knowing that his life’s direction hung on the reply. 

‘er..no’.

But Pollitzer was a perceptive teacher and another episode shows how he gently encouraged the nervous young man, when, having been asked to prepare the first violin part of a Haydn quartet, Edward, at the next lesson, skilfully filled in the rests with what was happening in the other parts, giving an impression of the whole thing. Pollitzer asked him,

‘Do you compose?’

(Perhaps every time we are moved by Elgar’s music, it is Pollitzer we should be thanking for this piece of unfashionably blunt truth-telling.)

Salut d’Amour was written four years later in a flood of love for Alice Roberts. (Here Ken Russel’s film overbrims with tenderness as he and Alice are seen fooling about in an orchard, riding donkeys and playing four hands at the piano). He sold the copyright to the publisher Schotts for two guineas, and it turned into a big commercial success for the publisher - though not for the composer. That Schotts later paid him some non-contractual royalites might give an impression of how successful it was - they certainly had absolutely no obligation to do so. He harboured a sense of perpetual resentment that he’d been cheated out of his due reward ever after – hence his remark to the fiddler he met 44 years later outside Queens Hall.  And in the pieces which followed Salut d’Amour, it is not difficult to see the chasing of a similar commercial success - but this time on better terms. On this album we have: La Capricieuse, written at possibly the lowest ebb in his and Alice’s quest to get him to become a successful composer and it is easily the piece most tilted towards the virtuoso tradition which he’d tried so hard to get into his playing. It has beautifully written use of various fancy bowing techniques surrounding a melody at least as winning as anything written in his Pomp and Circumstance marches. Then comes the pair of Chansons – ‘Nuit’ and ‘Matin’. (Amusing to notice how all these pieces have French titles – none had them to begin with. Publishers tended to think that a ‘foreign’ title would make them more sellable.) He made somewhat better ‘deals’ in getting these published and made various arrangements to make them as commercially viable as possible. But none approached the bulls-eye hit of Salut d’Amour.

What became the piece we know as Sospiri had its origins with Elgar again chasing the jackpot – this time with a publisher of lighter music. But he was now on the other side of those years of fame and fortune; years when an Elgar premiere was acclaimed almost as a national event.  But he seems to have realised that what was emerging was much more than a salon piece.  Here the miniature has fully emerged from its chrysalis and expands hugely from what on paper looks like little more than a few strummed chords and a melody.  He gave it the title Sospiri, ‘Sighs’, and made arrangements for violin and piano and for full strings with harp and organ and it was published by a separate arrangement.