The figure of the British composer Edward Elgar (1857–1934) is one of those who actively attract attention of the scholars (as well as that of the listeners and the performers) both during their lifetime and after the death of the artist. It is possible to name at least two reasons causing such a great interest of the scholars: outstanding artistic significance of the music written by him and a special status of E. Elgar as a first successful British composer-symphonist, the first one since the times of H. Purcell who was widely recognised both in Britain and abroad. Today, musicological study if the artist’s creative life is quite a fundamental one and includes numerous works with different research goals: general monographs by M. Kennedy, M. Hurd, I. Parrot and D. McVeagh, as well as articles by those scholars, devoted to separate problems of studying the composer’s outcome; a work by L. Meadows, devoted to the influence of R. Wagner’s creative approach on E. Elgar; the works by Ch. E. McGuire, J. Butt and B. Adams focusing on the personality of the composer, including his attitude towards religion and respective images; a group of articles regarding E. Elgar’s role as an official composer of the British Empire (E. Pucciarelli; R. Cowgill, D. Heckert, Ch. E. McGuire); studies of E. Elgar’s reception in different countries, carried out by A. Padgett and A. Thomson; articles aimed at studying some parts of E. Elgar’s orchestral works: by J. Rushton, who regards the works prior to the First Symphony, and by C. Mark, who describes timespan from 1910 and until the death of the composer. At the same time, that corpus of research lacks a work that would clearly and consecutively trace creative evolution of the artist and suggest its periodization, even if in one genre sphere. Be that as it may, a thorough study of E. Elgar’s orchestral works allows to reach a conclusion that such bipartite split of his orchestral outcome, evident from mentioned above research, is not fully according to the essence of his music. Thus, the subject of the study is the process of E. Elgar’s creative evolution, which is regarded as a search, on the basis of his orchestral works. The aim of the study is to reveal directionality, vectors of the artist’s compositional searches on different stages of his evolution on the material of his orchestral works.
The research uses the following methods: historically-typological, historically-evolutional, stylistic, genre, structurally-compositional, dramaturgical, musically-linguistic and comparative.
In the First Chapter of the dissertation the attention is focused on paradoxicality of E. Elgar’s creative personality, that lies in several peculiarities of his biography and character. We suggest a research conception of the split of the artist’s creative evolution in the sphere of orchestral music into four stages, which are defined as stage of trial, stage of success, stage of fulfilment and stage of reconsideration.
The Second Chapter of the research considers orchestral works which were written at the first two of the stages defined above.
The Third Chapter is devoted to two compositions that constitute the third stage of evolution of E. Elgar’s orchestral works, to the works belonging to the two conceptual genres: First Symphony (1908) and Violin Concerto (1910). This stage, serving a role of centre of gravity, towards which all the previous searches of the artist are aimed, is defined in the dissertation as stage of fulfilment.
The Fourth Chapter contains analysis of three works that are regarded as a last stage of E. Elgar’s evolution, stage of reconsideration. Those works include the Second Symphony (1911), symphonic study “Falstaff” (1913) and Cello Concerto (1919). Significant differences between those three compositions and from the previous works by E. Elgar make it possible to see similarity of this stage with the first one, due to active process of search in multiple vectors.
In the Conclusions the results of the dissertations are summarized, a general graph of E. Elgar’s evolution is drawn (search of unique style – achievement of it – crystallization – search of modernization), the perspectives of further research are defined.
Keywords: Edward Elgar, New English Musical Renaissance, composer, thinking, Romanticism, XIX – beginning of XX centuries, Late-Romantic style, Richard Wagner, art education, evolution, style constants, composer’s searches, creative experience, creative personality, orchestral writing, violin, writing technique, texture, program music, self-commentary.
