The Artist of the Unbreakable Code - Issue 18: Genius
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It was the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, 1897. Through a periscope, England was sailing along in all its hope and glory. That summer Edward Elgar turned 40 and was slowly emerging as the country’s greatest composer. For the jubilee he’d written The Imperial March, a foreshadowing of the Pomp and Circumstance marches that would make him famous. Earlier in the year he’d presented King Olaf, a foreshadowing of the choral and orchestral works that would make him great, including The Dream of Gerontius and Variations on an Original Theme (“Enigma”), known as the Enigma Variations. In the middle of that July, Elgar was in the midst of writing a new festival work, Te Deum and Benedictus, working inside a large tent set up in the front garden of the house in Malvern, in the south of (...)