| “Romantic by temperament and poetic by nature” is how Elgar’s eldest sister, Lucy, described the personality of their mother, Ann Elgar, neé Greening. Ann was a remarkable woman. Born near to Weston-under-Penyard in Herefordshire she was a farmer's daughter and hardly educated; yet she developed a keen interest in literature, wrote poetry and had a real understanding of nature and the countryside around her. |
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Ann was living with relatives in Worcester when she met William Henry Elgar. He was a native of Dover and had been apprenticed to a firm of piano-tuners. He settled in Worcester in the early 1840s to set up his own piano-tuning business, and later a general music store. They married in 1848 and moved to a house near to the cathedral.
By 1856 they had three children, and Ann's wish for a country life brought her family from their home in the narrow streets of Victorian Worcester, across the Severn, to settle in the hamlet of Broadheath. Here they became tenants of a little cottage known at various times as “The Firs” and “Newbury Cottage”. The setting and views amply satisfied Ann’s romantic vision. Facing south towards the Malvern Hills across the River Teme, with its hay meadows, its fir trees, its meandering brooks and its wide views, the place was to her idyllic.
This little cottage saw the birth of Edward William Elgar on 2nd June 1857. Lucy later recalled the occasion: “How well I remember the day he was born! The air was sweet with the perfume of flowers, bees were humming and all the earth was lovely.”
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The family’s stay in Broadheath was all too brief and less than three years after Elgar’s birth the family had moved back to the city. Elgar’s father's business was flourishing and he was spending more and more time in the city. He eventually opened a music shop at 10 High Street and the family lived “over the shop” for many years. However Ann Elgar made sure that Edward visited the village of his birth as often as possible. |
During the summer he was sent with his brother and sisters to stay on a farm at Broadheath, and it was on one of these holidays that he composed his first tunes. The music was intended to accompany a little play which the Elgar children and their friends attempted to write. Elgar himself remembered:
"By means of a stage-allegory - which was never completed - it was proposed to show that children were not properly understood. The scene was a 'Woodland Glade', intersected by a brook; the hither side of this was our fairyland; beyond, small and distant, was the ordinary life which we forgot as often as possible. The characters, on crossing the stream, entered fairyland and were transfigured…Our orchestral means were meagre: a pianoforte, two or three strings, a flute and some improvised percussion were all we could depend upon; the double bass was of our own manufacture and three pounds of nails went into its making.”
Some forty or so years later, Elgar went back to these youthful tunes and they formed the basis of the music he called The Wand of Youth.
Throughout his life Elgar guarded idyllic impressions of Broadheath. He never tired of returning to the village and, even as an old man, he talked to his close friends of his love of the place and encouraged many of them to visit with him.
As a child, Elgar had elementary piano and violin lessons, but he didn't have a single music theory lesson in his life. He was in his thirties before he composed anything of any real merit, and recognition didn’t come until the production of the Enigma Variations, by which time he was forty-two. Over the next twenty years, he composed all of the great works for which he is now remembered - the symphonies, the concertos, the Dream of Gerontius and Pomp & Circumstance to name but a few.
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All of these masterpieces were composed during the years of his marriage. In 1889 he married Alice Roberts. She had a very different background to Elgar. Her father had been a Major-General in the Indian Army and they were Anglicans. At the time of their marriage Elgar was virtually penniless, he was the son of a shop-keeper and was a Roman Catholic to boot. |
Any one of these would have been unforgivable to the Roberts family and Alice was promptly cut out of several aunts' and uncles' wills. Yet she had an absolute belief in Elgar's genius - virtually from the time that they first met, and her faith was rewarded.
Eventually Elgar was feted all over the world; he dined with royalty, was knighted and awarded the Order of Merit. Yet he never forgot his roots, and when he became a Baronet in1931, he chose as his title First Baronet of Broadheath.
