Elgar before Variations

Elgar's output prior to Op. 36 was already varied in conception, scale, and purpose. The choral masterpieces that followed Variations – The Dream of Gerontius, The Apostles, The Kingdom, and The Music Makers – still tend to overshadow earlier choral works; yet by 1898, at forty-one, Elgar could boast considerable artistic (if not commercial) success, with The Black Knight (1892), Scenes from the Bavarian Highlands (1895), The Light of Life (1896), and King Olaf (1896). There were already voices suggesting that this was the best English music since Purcell, and Parry, himself the most firmly established composer in the field, called Elgar (with only a little hindsight) ‘a new light of exceptional brilliancy’ (other senior composers, Stanford, Mackenzie, and Cowen, were also early admirers). Elgar had written no orchestral music of comparable sophistication. The precursors of Variations were light orchestral pieces of inimitable charm, like the string serenade; exquisite salon music, like Salut d'amour or Chanson de nuit; and minor excursions into exoticism, like Sérénade Mauresque. Many ideas of orchestral potential, lying unused in notebooks, happily resurfaced in later compositions, even in Op. 36 itself. The exception is the concert overture of 1890, a broadly conceived and thematically prolific sonata form which takes its mood, rather than any programme, from Froissart's Chronicles. Froissart matches, or excels, the finest British orchestral output of its time; yet by comparison with Elgar's later symphonic work it seems structurally loose.