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As a young musician in Worcester, Elgar filled a succession of roles which required him to
produce music for performance on a variety of instruments - as organist of St George's
church in Worcester, for the wind quintet that he formed with his brother and friends in 1878, for
the various local orchestras in which he played, and for the Powick Asylum Band that
he conducted. To meet this demand, in addition to the small works he himself composed, he also
turned to the masters with whose music he was well acquainted - Bach,
Beethoven, Handel, Mozart and others - for pieces that he could
readily transcribe, usually in abridged form, for the relevant combination of instruments. But as
he matured and his ambitions to make a career as a composer crystallised, he abandoned
transcription and devoted his full energies to the composition of original works.
In 1920, Lady Elgar died. It came as a crushing blow to Elgar, depriving him of his main
source of motivation. From that day on, he composed no major work that was wholly original,
turning instead to his old sketchbooks and, once more, to the works of the great masters for
inspiration.
The first work to follow Alice's death came about through a chance conversation with
Richard Strauss. Elgar, eager to heal the rifts caused by the First World War,
was quick to resume a friendship with Strauss dating back to the early German performances of
The Dream of Gerontius in 1901-2. Over a lunch in
1920, the two discussed the orchestration of Bach's organ works. The lunch ended with
Elgar agreeing to orchestrate the Fugue in C Minor while Strauss was to orchestrate the
Fantasia. Elgar completed his part of the agreement by the Spring of 1921 and the
orchestrated fugue was first performed at the Queen's Hall, London in the Autumn of
the same year. The 1922 Three Choirs Festival was to be held in Gloucester
and Elgar's friend and festival director Herbert Brewer, the organist at Gloucester
Cathedral, turned to Elgar for advice on promising British composers who might be
approached for new works for the festival. Brewer also asked Elgar if he would consider writing
something. With no sign that Strauss intended fulfilling his side of the bargain struck
two years earlier, Elgar now set about orchestrating the Bach Fantasia. He completed
his task by June 1922, in good time for the Fantasia and Fugue to be performed together
at the September festival.
The Bach transcription was sufficiently well received for Elgar to orchestrate another organ
work for the 1923 festival, held in Worcester. This time it was Handel's
Overture in D Minor. Many probably consider this to be the best and most widely
known of Elgar's orchestral transcriptions. But in coming to that view, they may well be
overlooking two immensely popular works where Elgar's role as orchestrator has been largely
forgotten.
The first of these is Hubert Parry's setting of part of William Blake's poem
Jerusalem. Parry was a bastion of the English musical establishment that Elgar heartily
despised, but Elgar clearly recognised something in Parry - the musical idealist, the perfect
gentleman, the gentle soul who rebelled against his own privileged upbringing - that set him apart
from other establishment figures. True, Parry had long championed Elgar's music, but hardly
more so than others such as Stanford who had nevertheless felt the cutting edge of
Elgar's tongue. Parry died in 1918. As if by way of tribute to him, in 1922 Elgar provided
Jerusalem with an orchestral accompaniment, the form in which it is most widely known
today.
The final orchestration came about at the suggestion of Elgar's record company which by
1930 had become Electrical and Musical Industries (EMI). The record
company had recently signed up the newly formed BBC Symphony Orchestra with
Adrian Boult as conductor. Looking for suitable material for the orchestra to record,
the company suggested to Boult that Elgar should be approached to provide a transcription of
Chopin's Funeral March from his second Piano Sonata. Boult wrote
to Elgar who accepted the invitation. The orchestra recorded the work in May 1932. Although
Elgar's orchestration does not fully conceal the origins of the piece as piano music, the population
at large now think of it primarily in its orchestral arrangement.
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