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The story of how Elgar came to compose Carillon
for the benefit of Belgian wartime charities is told elsewhere. The success of Carillon naturally caused him to contemplate setting
further war poems. When the celebrated British war poet Laurence Binyon gave him
a copy of The Winnowing Fan, a collection of his own war poems, Elgar selected three
of the poems with the intention of setting them to music. But when he discovered that fellow
composer Cyril B Rootham was also setting one of the poems, For the Fallen,
Elgar felt that he could no longer proceed with his own setting. Fortunately, friends prevailed on
Elgar to change his mind and by July he had resumed work on what turned out to be indisputably
the greatest of his wartime compositions, The Spirit of
England.
But in the interregnum, he was approached by the Polish conductor Emil Mlynarski
to compose something to help Polish refugees in the way that Carillon had helped the Belgians. Within the space of two
months, Elgar produced Polonia which he dedicated to Ignace Paderewski,
pianist, composer and later to become the first Prime Minister of the new Polish state. Elgar
called Polonia a symphonic prelude but it is in fact more of a rhapsody in the style of
Enescu and Liszt. Original Elgar is interspersed with Polish folk tunes and the
Polish national anthem with brief quotations from compositions by Chopin and by
Paderewski himself. It is a lively and varied piece, progressing speedily through a
succession of emotions. As Elgar's only work based on a medley of nationalist tunes, it is a
significant work of considerable merit. It never achieved the success of Carillon but was sufficiently well received for The
Gramophone Company (later His Master's Voice) to commission Elgar to record
the work for them in 1919.
A more detailed account of the background to Polonia, written by Elgar Society
member Joseph Herter, can be found at
http://www.usc.edu/dept/polish_music/news/aug99.html#back3. .
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