Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet, OM, GCVO (2 June 1857 – 23 February 1934)
was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international
classical concert repertoire. Among his best-
Although Elgar is often regarded as a typically English composer, most of his musical
influences were not from England but from continental Europe. He felt himself to
be an outsider, not only musically, but socially. In musical circles dominated by
academics, he was a self-
In his fifties, Elgar composed a symphony and a violin concerto that were immensely successful. His second symphony and his cello concerto did not gain immediate public popularity and took many years to achieve a regular place in the concert repertory of British orchestras. Elgar's music came, in his later years, to be seen as appealing chiefly to British audiences. His stock remained low for a generation after his death. It began to revive significantly in the 1960s, helped by new recordings of his works. Some of his works have, in recent years, been taken up again internationally, but the music remains more played in Britain than elsewhere.
Elgar has been described as the first composer to take the gramophone seriously. Between 1914 and 1925, he conducted a series of acoustic recordings of his works. The introduction of the microphone in 1925 made far more accurate sound reproduction possible, and Elgar made new recordings of most of his major orchestral works and excerpts from The Dream of Gerontius.