Elgar Who?

Have you ever heard of Edward Elgar? Oh, come on. He's England's darling composer. He lived in the last half of the 19th century and the first while of the 20th. Have you seen Disney's Fantasia 2000? You know that one with Donald Duck? Oh, yes. Pomp and Circumstance. Very famous. Played at most of the graduations I've been to. (Not the Seminary ones, but whatever.) Okay, so you have heard of Elgar, or at least you've heard his music.

Morgan and I went to a concert a couple of years ago and on the program was Elgar's Enigma Theme and Variations. Morgan got very excited, but I was in the dark as to why this was going to be such an amazing concert. Before they started the piece, the conductor got up to introduce it. There followed an interesting introduction to one of the more fascinating pieces of music I've ever listened to. (Don't read fascinating to be "weird" here. Read beautiful and you want to know its history.)

The story goes that Elgar was playing a theme on the piano and his wife enjoyed it very much. She asked him to play it again and so he did. Then, messing around, he started playing variations on the theme, each variation representing a friend of his. ("I shall now play the theme in the style of so and so.") He came up with 14 variations, which was 13 friends and himself.

The conductor told us there were two puzzles when the music was played. First of all, which friends Elgar was playing in the style of. [Note: Again, we are speaking a Germanic language and it is absolutely okay for me to end a sentence with a preposition.] The second puzzle is where the theme for Enigma came from. Elgar supposedly took a popular piece of music from the day and wrote a countermelody or something to it, which was the theme for the piece. Again, supposedly he thought it was so easy to guess that he felt silly even saying which piece it was, so he never said.

One of my favorite pieces of music comes from Elgar's Enigma variations. It's number 9, which is called the "Nimrod" variation. It refers to his best friend, whose surname was Jaeger, which in German means "hunter." And Nimrod was a famous hunter from the Bible. Fun, huh? Anyway, here's a fantastic performance of the Nimrod variation from Elgar's Enigma. It's some of the most beautiful music you'll ever hear. I promise.



Remember my impeccable taste? You can't disagree with me on this one, can you?! Jaeger was Elgar's best friend. You can tell from the nobility of the music that he must have really respected and loved the man. Fantastic! (Boy, have I used all the same emphatic words? No. There's still stupendous left.)

In the interest of not boring some of you to death, I have not included the whole story behind the music. Look it up. You'll enjoy it. At least, I did. It's stupendous! ["Hyuck, hyuck." Can you name that book?]