Edward Elgar

Edward Elgar was born in 1857, a Roman Catholic shopkeeper's son in Protestant Britain, teaching himself composition while the academy looked elsewhere. He married above his station - the daughter of a senior Army officer - and she pushed him forward, but success didn't arrive until he was past forty. The Enigma Variations in 1899 broke through at home and abroad, followed a year later by The Dream of Gerontius, a Catholic text that unsettled Anglican England but lodged itself in the repertory for good. In his fifties he delivered a symphony and violin concerto to immense acclaim; the second symphony and cello concerto took decades to find their place. By his later years the music seemed to speak mainly to British ears, and after his death in 1934 his stock sank for a generation. The revival came in the 1960s, powered by new recordings - he'd been the first major composer to take the gramophone seriously, conducting his own works in sessions from 1914 to 1925 and rerecording them when better microphones arrived.