Elgar was born on 2nd June 1857 at Broadheath, His father had a music shop in Worcester and tuned pianos. There he had a music shop
where the whole family helped him. So Elgar grew up in a very musical atmosphere. He studied the music in his father's shop and teached himself how to play different instruments. Also he composed some pieces and he learned that also by himself. His father didn’t agree with this things. He thought a career in music would be nothing for his sun. So he send him to a lawyers office to work there. But Edward’s interest was music, so he still studied music and musictheory. In 1878 he became the conductor of a orchestra for the workers of a psychiatric institution, and he he took a job as a teacher in Malvern. He also began to send his compositions to publishers and conductors. But they were very often send back, not because they were bad compositions but he came from a province and he was very catholic. Throughout the 1880s and the 1890s his experience grew and his style matured as he conducted and composed for local musical organisations. He also taught the violin and played the In 1889 he married one of his pupils, Caroline Alice Roberts, daughter of the late Major- General Sir Henry Roberts. Her family said that it wasn’t good to marry him because he was the son of a normal man, a music teacher with no prospects . So they said that she would marry a man that stood beneath herself. But alice believed in him and said to him that he must go on with composing. She thought he was very good and said that to him. So he began to work hard on his compositions. Not with no results. His early work ‘ouverture froissart’ was accepted by the three choirs festival. He went to London, but in London he didn’t succeed, so he went back to Worcester. Slowly, and through such early works as Froissart (1890), the Imperial March (1897) and the cantatas King Olaf (1896) and Caractacus (1898),his repetation had becoming very good in the area of Worcester. His first big success came with the Variations on an Original Theme (Enigma) in 1899. Dedicated to "my friends pictured within", this work, which is a masterpiece of form and orchestration, showed that Elgar, by that time was better than other important English composers of that day.

After Sea Pictures, a song cycle for contralto and orchestra (1899), came one of Elgar's greatest religious compositions - The Dream of Gerontius - based on Cardinal Newman's poem about a soul's journey through to its judgement and beyond. But of the first performance of that piece in Birmingham in October 1900 was a failure but the musiccritics recognised the greatness of the work.But , the composition was played later by a second performance under Julius Buths at Dusseldorf in December 1901, and again at the Lower Rhine Festival in Dusseldorf in May the following year and the work was played much better. Following this performance, Richard Strauss praised Elgar as the first English progressive musician.
After the initial failure of the Dream of Gerontius in 1900, Elgar was understandably depressed, but within a few days he had started writing again - a concert overture - Cockaigne (In London Town)...








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