Portrait of Elgar (Clarendon Paperbacks)

Rating:
Summary: A convincing portrait of a complex musician.
Review: Elgar's reputation suffered for a long time because listeners had trouble reconciling the exuberance of pieces like the Pomp and Circumstance marches with works like the Violin Concerto. (Pinchas Zukerman has described that work as the most psychologically complex violin concerto in the repertory.) In short, people couldn't decide whether Elgar was a crowd-pleaser or a poet.

Michael Kennedy's biography, first published in 1968 and now in its third edition, traces the contradictory impulses in Elgar's art and shows how they contributed to its vitality. He also explains how Elgar became one of music's finest orchestrators, despite a lack of formal training. He describes Elgar's varied apprenticeship as a "jack-of-all-trades" musician--playing organ, violin and bassoon in his native Worcester--which gave him a thorough knowledge of how instrumental sounds combine.

Kennedy, who has written books on Mahler, Richard Strauss and Vaughan Williams, offers valuable insights into the music as well as its composer. His judgments on the respective value of Elgar's works will be especially useful to anyone exploring them for the first time. The book contains four appendices, including a detailed list of Elgar's recordings, which give us, for the first time in history, a record of how a major composer wanted his music performed.

This book played an important part in the Elgar revival of the sixties and seventies. (Recordings by Adrian Boult and John Barbirolli, subjects of two other Kennedy biographies, helped too.) It's a measure of this book's importance that Elgarians still consider it essential today.