The Malvern hills are alive with the sound of music. “ … 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.” So said Edward Elgar.
He heard music in the air as he tramped along the Malvern hills. I had incorrectly assumed that Sir Edward was a Victorian musical grandee but I could not have been more wrong. He was brought up and educated in Worcestershire where his father was a piano tuner and had a shop selling sheet music and musical instruments. Edward learned piano and violin at school but his ambition to study music in Leipzig was unrealised because of lack of funds. Instead he went to work as a clerk in a solicitor’s office until he escaped to give piano and violin lessons and help his father in his shop. Socially he was not out of the top drawer and a further handicap, in the Shires in those days, was his Catholicism.
When he was thirty-two he married Alice, the daughter of a Major General, and Sir Henry was not at all thrilled by his son-in-law, going so far as to disinherit his only daughter. As Elgar’s reputation burgeoned he must have felt a bit of a chump. In fact Alice did a great deal to promote her husband’s career and relished being Lady Elgar – no doubt a further source of discomfort to Sir Henry, if he was still alive.
I found myself gulping in loads of Malvern musical air toiling up the quite steep hills: British Camp is 1,109 feet above sea level. It is an Iron Age hill fort built in the second century BC and then the site of a Norman castle. No trace of the latter remains but the ditches and embankments of the former are clearly visible. More from Malvern tomorrow. Meanwhile you might like to reflect on Wagner’s influence on Elgar’s work.
Did not know that! I love Elgar music
To be fair (something that I am normally reluctant to do) to Sir Henry he died when Alice was 12 years old. Elgar married Alice almost 30 years after Sir Henry’s death. Alice’s mother died two years before the marriage. If Alice was indeed disinherited it would be interesting to know why.
Thank you for doing some research that I should have undertaken. I misread Wikipedia and now think she was possibly disinherited by her brother(s):
Elgar’s biographer Michael Kennedy writes, “Alice’s family was horrified by her intention to marry an unknown musician who worked in a shop and was a Roman Catholic. She was disinherited.”