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While Elgar's ambitions from an early age may have tended towards the large-scale works for
full orcestra that flowed from his pen from Froissart
onward, a struggling composer must be more pragmatic if he wishes his works to be played and
should write them for ensembles within his geographical ambit as well as his technical
competence. Elgar's earliest compositions were for musical groups over which he had a measure
of control - the fraternal Wand of Youth ensemble, the
wind quintet he formed with his close friends, the
organs of various churches in the Worcester area and the Powick Asylum band. But after a
number of aborted early attempts at writing chamber works, Elgar took his first tentative steps
towards reaching a wider audience with two works for small orchestra - the Suite in D
of 1882-83 and Sevilliana of 1884.
The Suite comprised four movements - a mazurka, an intermezzo (subtitled Serenade
Mauresque) a fantasia gavotte and a march - Pas Redoublé. The second and
fourth movements received performances as separate pieces in Worcester in April 1883 and
February 1882 respectively. But a first performance of the complete work had to wait until
March 1888 in Birmingham when the conductor was W C Stockley, later to conduct
the disastrous première of The Dream of
Gerontius. Elgar was nevertheless sufficiently encouraged by the work to revise the
first three movements for publication in 1899 as Three Characteristic Pieces. He
dedicated it to Lady Mary Lygon, the subject
of the thirteenth Enigma Variation.
Sevilliana is a shorter work with, as its name implies, a Spanish feel to it. This
Spanish
influence was to recur intermittently throughout Elgar's later works, notably in the Spanish Serenade of 1891 and in The Black Knight. But although Sevilliana is a
pleasant and tuneful little number, there is little in it to suggest that Elgar was capable of writing
the masterpieces of his later years. Elgar dedicated Sevilliana to Stockley as if in anticipation of
the help he was later to give Elgar's career.
Over the next twenty-five years, Elgar's output for small orchestra was no more than a few
arrangements of pieces written for solo piano or for piano and violin : admittedly these included
the immensely popular Salut d'Amour and the Chansons de Nuit et de Matin and the Minuet of 1897 which Elgar published in an orchestral
arrangement the following year. But the success of these orchestral arrangements makes it all the
more surprising that he did not attempt more. Only the Serenade Lyrique of 1900
emerged as a piece intended for performance by small orchestra from its conception.
Then, in the years leading up to the First World War, emerged three works in quick
succession.
In style, origin and motivation, the three are each quite distinct. The first of the three, the
Romance for Bassoon and Orchestra, sits oddly among Elgar's output until it is
remembered that Elgar was himself the bassoonist in the wind
quintet of 1878-1882. But this work is no throwback to the wind quintet days. The
lazy, rather meandering melody of the Romance is in marked contrast to the lively, rather agitated
style of many of the pieces for wind quintet and the formality of the slower movements.
What caused Elgar to write this unusual work? The dedication is to Edwin F James, the
soloist
at the first performance, but James does not feature elsewhere in the Elgar biography and it seems
more likely that the dedication was more a token of gratitude for 'services rendered' than a mark
of deeper affaction. That the work results from a lingering attachment to his youthful days in the
quintet is supported by the fact that the second work from this period, Cantique, is
indeed an arrangement for small orchestra of the second Intermezzo of 1879.
The last of the three works from this period, Carissima, is also a reworking of a
piece
from Elgar's sketchbooks. But the significance of the piece is not its precendents but in the
portent it held for the future, for this was the work that intorduced Elgar to the recording
industry. The work was first performed in January 1914 at a recording session at the HMV
studios at Hayes, Middlesex. It was to be the start of a long and productive relationship with the
record company, lasting right
up to his death. His last completed work, Mina (the name being that of his Cairn terrier), also
received its first performance at a recording session for EMI, as HMV had by then become. And
it is somehow fitting that Elgar dedicated the work to Fred Gaisberg, the HMV/EMI executive
who had done much to encourage Elgar's interest in the new medium.
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