Edward Elgar

He was largely self taught, worked for years as a jobbing violinist, teacher and bandmaster in Worcestershire, and was over 40 before the Variations made him nationally known in 1899.

The house he was born in, at Broadheath outside Worcester, is now the Elgar Birthplace Museum and holds a substantial collection of his manuscripts and letters. His music is out of copyright and the scores are freely available from online score libraries such as IMSLP, which is why student orchestras play him as readily as professional ones.

The Enigma Variations, and what the enigma is

The Enigma Variations of 1899 is a set of fourteen variations on an original theme, each one a portrait of a person in Elgar's circle, identified in the score only by initials or a nickname. Variation 9 is Nimrod, written for August Jaeger, his editor at the publisher Novello: Jaeger is German for hunter, and Nimrod is the hunter of the Book of Genesis, so the title is a pun on a friend's surname. The last variation is a self portrait.

Elgar wrote the piece because a private game got out of hand. He improvised at the piano one evening, playing a theme in the manner of one friend after another, and was asked to write the results down. The work grew from that domestic joke into an orchestral set that Hans Richter conducted in London and that carried Elgar's name abroad within a year.

The enigma of the title is a separate puzzle and remains unsolved. Elgar stated that a larger, unheard theme runs through the whole set and is never played, and he never said what it was. Candidates proposed over more than a century include Auld Lang Syne and several hymn tunes, and none has been demonstrated. Nobody knows.

The Cello Concerto in E minor

The Cello Concerto in E minor of 1919 has four movements and runs about 30 minutes, which makes it noticeably shorter than the concertos it usually sits beside on a programme. It was Elgar's last substantial work. He wrote it in the year after the First World War ended, and the tone of the piece, spare, tired and unconsoled, is why listeners so consistently hear the war in it even though Elgar never labelled it as such.

The unusual features are audible from the first bar. The soloist opens alone with a series of chords, unaccompanied and unhurried, before the orchestra has played a note. The second movement is a fast, quiet, almost weightless scherzo built on rapid string crossings. The third is a short slow movement with no development at all. The finale is the longest, and near its end the opening recitative returns, which is Elgar closing the circle rather than driving to a climax.

Is it hard to play

Yes, but not in the way audiences assume. The concerto has fewer notes per bar than the Dvorak and far fewer showpiece passages, so it looks approachable on the page. The difficulty is threefold: exposed high register writing where a small intonation error is fully audible, the second movement's spiccato string crossings at speed, and the control needed for the slow movement, where the cellist plays long lines at low volume with no orchestral cover. It is a standard conservatoire and competition work.

Elgar against Dvorak: the two cello concertos compared

Dvorak's Cello Concerto in B minor of 1895 and Elgar's are the two pillars of the repertoire, and orchestras rarely play them in the same season. They ask for different things.

What makes Elgar's orchestration recognisable

Elgar's orchestral sound is identifiable within a few bars, and the reasons are technical rather than mysterious. He divides his string sections constantly, so that a single chord is spread across six or eight real parts rather than four, which produces the thick, warm middle register that is his signature. He doubles a melody at the octave between a wind instrument and a string section so that neither timbre dominates. He uses the brass in the middle of their range for colour rather than at the top for volume, and he reserves the full weight for very short stretches. He marks the score more heavily than almost any of his contemporaries, with detailed and frequently changing instructions for volume and tempo, which is why two conductors can produce noticeably different results while both following the printed page.

He had played in orchestras himself, and it shows in writing that is grateful rather than awkward. The Introduction and Allegro of 1905 is the clearest demonstration: a solo string quartet set against the full strings, with a fugue in the middle, written to show what a British string section could do.

The rest of the output

Beyond the Variations and the Cello Concerto, five works carry the reputation. The Serenade for Strings in E minor of 1892 is early, brief and the piece most amateur string orchestras play. The Symphony No. 1 in A flat of 1908 was an event on a scale hard to imagine now, taken up by orchestra after orchestra within months. The Symphony No. 2 in E flat of 1911 is longer, stranger and was received coldly. The Violin Concerto in B minor of 1910 is one of the longest in the repertoire and was written for Fritz Kreisler. The oratorio The Dream of Gerontius of 1900 belongs with the large choral works rather than here. A third symphony was left in sketches at his death in 1934.

The gap between the Cello Concerto of 1919 and Elgar's death in 1934 is the fact that most repays thinking about. He lived another fifteen years and finished nothing large. The Edwardian world he wrote for did not survive the war, and he appears to have known it before his audience did.

Also in this programme

• The repertoireThe pieces that keep coming back, and why
• Ralph Vaughan WilliamsThe Tallis Fantasia, the Lark and the symphonies
• Holst and The PlanetsThe Planets, movement by movement
• Karl JenkinsThe most performed living Welsh composer