‘Welcome home, Sir Edward! Welcome home!’
Epilogue
Edward Elgar lived on another ten years without composing anything of much significance. He did however make recordings of his own music whose value as historic and artistic documents justified his friends’ encouragement in the face of his own gloomy predictions.
From time to time in that final decade he would look out his notes and sketches for various projects – principally a piano concerto, an opera and a third symphony. Late in 1932 the BBC, largely at Bernard Shaw’s urging, commissioned the symphony for £1000. Throughout the following year there were brief flickers of the creative flame interspersed with such distractions as the heady pleasure of at last becoming an aeronaut. At the end of May he flew to France to conduct the Paris première of his Violin Concerto with Yehudi Menuhin, combining this trip with a visit to the dying Delius at Grez-sur-Loing. Back in England he tried again with the symphony, which was progressing but feebly. The first signs of his own cancer appeared although at the time he was more anguished by a disease increasingly evident in Europe. He had already written to Frank Schuster’s sister Adela:
I am in a maze regarding events in Germany – what are they doing? In this morning’s paper it is said that the greatest conductor Bruno Walter &, stranger still, Einstein are ostracised: are we all mad? The Jews have always been my best and kindest friends – the pain of these news is unbearable & I do not know what it really means.
He died in February 1934, working on his symphony until the last. On that very day the Hildebrand, which had been sold to a man in Monmouthshire for £11,000, was being broken up. The ship had been built in 1911, the year of Elgar’s Second Symphony and arguably the high summer of his output. Thus by a strange coincidence its lifespan happened precisely to encompass the declining years of the Amazon cruises as well as of the creative and calendrical life of Sir Edward Elgar.
About the Author
James Hamilton-Paterson is the author of the bestselling Empire of the Clouds, which was hailed as a classic account of the golden age of British aviation. He won a Whitbread Prize for his first novel, Gerontius, and among his many other celebrated books are Seven-Tenths, one of the finest books written in recent times about the oceans, the satirical trilogy that began with Cooking with Fernet Branca, and the autobiographical Playing with Water. Born and educated in England, he has lived in the Philippines and Italy and now makes his home in Austria.
By the same author
FICTION
Loving Monsters
The View from Mount Dog
Gerontius
The Bell-Boy
Griefwork
Ghosts of Manila
The Music
Cooking with Fernet Branca
Amazing Disgrace
Rancid Pansies
CHILDREN’S FICTION
Flight Underground
The House in the Waves
Hostage!
NON-FICTION
A Very Personal War: The Story of Cornelius Hawkridge
(also published as The Greedy War)
Mummies: Death and Life in Ancient Egypt
Playing with Water
Seven-Tenths
America’s Boy
Three Miles Down
Empire of the Clouds: How Britain’s Aircraft Ruled the World
POETRY
Option Three
Dutch Alps
Copyright
First published in 1989
By Macmillan London Ltd
This paperback edition first published in 2017
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2017
All rights reserved
© James Hamilton-Paterson, 1989
Foreword © Colin Matthews, 2017
Cover image © Stapleton Collection/Corbis
The right of James Hamilton-Paterson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–31402–7
Gerontius Page 35
