Portrait of Elgar (Clarendon Paperbacks) [Paperback]

Michael Kennedy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 26, 1993 | ISBN-10: 0198163657 | ISBN-13: 978-0198163657 | Edition: 3

The public image of Elgar as patriotic country squire was established in his lifetime, but, in reality, it concealed a highly complex, sometimes baffling, private individual. Although acquaintances found him a man of endless curiosity and good humour, his family and close friends knew him to be rather different: a prey to despair, neurotically mistrustful both of himself and of those who loved him and so damaged by the condescension and neglect of his early years that emotionally he never recovered.

This is a reissue of the third edition of Michael Kenedy's portrait of this complexman - not an analytical survey of the music but a faithful likeness of the composer, recognizable, but at the same time a thoroughly individual interpretation of the subject.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for previous editions: "A brilliant biography....Elgar is no easier to capture on the page than he was to deal with in life. Yet Mr. Kennedy succeeds superbly, displacing the flabby legend of Elgar as an Edwardian musical blimp with a convincing portrait of a complex, lonely man of great gifts whose music, composed for the most part in the shadow of the Schoenbergian revolution, has never quite achieved the place it deserves."--The New York Times Book Review

"Swift, persuasive...As a character study it is better than a novel since it deals with the real life of a great composer."--Times Literary Supplement

"Masterly...A rich rewarding book."--Music and Musicians

About the Author

Michael Kennedy is Chief Music Critic, Sunday Telegraph.

Product Details

• Paperback: 408 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 3 edition (August 26, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0198163657
• ISBN-13: 978-0198163657
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,148,814 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A convincing portrait of a complex musician., November 28, 2001

By 

Frank Beck (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Portrait of Elgar (Oxford Paperbacks) (Paperback)

Elgar's reputation suffered for a long time because listeners had trouble reconciling the exuberance of pieces like the Pomp and Circumstance marches with works like the Violin Concerto. (Pinchas Zukerman has described that work as the most psychologically complex violin concerto in the repertory.) In short, people couldn't decide whether Elgar was a crowd-pleaser or a poet.

Michael Kennedy's biography, first published in 1968 and now in its third edition, traces the contradictory impulses in Elgar's art and shows how they contributed to its vitality. He also explains how Elgar became one of music's finest orchestrators, despite a lack of formal training. He describes Elgar's varied apprenticeship as a "jack-of-all-trades" musician--playing organ, violin and bassoon in his native Worcester--which gave him a thorough knowledge of how instrumental sounds combine.

Kennedy, who has written books on Mahler, Richard Strauss and Vaughan Williams, offers valuable insights into the music as well as its composer. His judgments on the respective value of Elgar's works will be especially useful to anyone exploring them for the first time. The book contains four appendices, including a detailed list of Elgar's recordings, which give us, for the first time in history, a record of how a major composer wanted his music performed.

This book played an important part in the Elgar revival of the sixties and seventies. (Recordings by Adrian Boult and John Barbirolli, subjects of two other Kennedy biographies, helped too.) It's a measure of this book's importance that Elgarians still consider it essential today.