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Elgar

Edward Elgar (1857–1934) was largely self-taught as a composer, the son of a Worcester music-shop owner who spent years as a local violin teacher before the Enigma Variations brought him sudden fame at forty-one. The work's title refers to a puzzle he set but never solved: he claimed the theme went with another well-known melody that has never been convincingly identified. When his wife Alice died in 1920 he fell almost entirely silent; he was working on a Third Symphony when he died fourteen years later, leaving sketches eventually realised by Anthony Payne in 1997. His string writing, from the Serenade for Strings to the Introduction and Allegro, remains central to the repertoire.

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