Edward Elgar

English composer (1857-1934)

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Lived 1857–1934, aged 77United Kingdom

United Kingdom MusiciansSinger / Musician

Wikipedia
66 languages
Cross-language footprint
Era
1857–1934
Aged 77
Known for
Ken Russell's ABC of B…
1988

Summary

Updated 2026-06-10

He wrote the tune that plays at every British graduation, and the choral work that seized the Edwardian concert hall — but spent decades as a self-taught outsider in a world that prized pedigree, battling class suspicion and religious unease before the Enigma Variations made him impossible to ignore.

Biography

About

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 s…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Edward Elgar

Edward Elgar

said9 Oct 1900

I always said God was against art and I still believe it.

— Letter to A. J. Jaeger, October 9, 1900.

Edward Elgar

said1899

To my friends pictured within.

— Dedication to the Enigma Variations (1899).

Edward Elgar

said1896

My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us, the world is full of it and you simply take as much as you require.

— In conversation in 1896, quoted in R J Buckley Sir Edward Elgar (London: Bodley Head, 1905), p. 32.

Edward Elgar

saidundated

Play it like something you hear down by the river.

— Diana M McVeagh Edward Elgar: His Life and Music (London: J. M. Dent, 1955) p. 163.

Edward Elgar

saidundated

Elgar is not manic enough to be Russian, not witty or pointilliste enough to be French, not harmonically simple enough to be Italian and not stodgy enough to be German.

— Anthony Burgess in The Observer, 1983; reprinted in his Homage to Qwert Yuiop (London: Abacus, 1987) p. 567.

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

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