Rustling Reeds and Lofty Pines: Elgar and the Music of Nature

In contemporary Britain, the music of Elgar carries persistent associations with ideas of nature and a sense of place. Elgar scholarship has usually treated his utterances on the subject as biographical testimony, yet they also evoke a network of concepts inherited from myths, literary conventions, and the preoccupations of the Romantic movement. An awareness of this context yields new perspectives on his music, especially those passages that imitate the sound of wind, be it among reeds, trees, or across the strings of an Aeolian harp.