In Tune with Elgar
Malvern Hills, Worcestershire
by Sarah Shuckburgh
Sarah Shuckburgh returns to
the hills she wandered as a child and is moved by the
views that inspired Britain’s greatest composer.
Music fills my head as I plod up the steep slopes of the
Worcestershire Beacon. I scarcely notice the punishing
gradient, nor the chilly wind whipping my hair against my
cheek. At the top I swig from my bottle of sparkling Malvern
water, while Elgar’s Nimrod blasts out over the immense
Severn Vale towards the distant, green-grey Cotswold hills.
The harmonies embrace the genteel town of Great Malvern just
below the Beacon, and float over the village of Broadheath,
where Elgar was born, and on to the city of Worcester. I
turn and look west, and now the notes capture the rural
beauty of Herefordshire, its rolling hills, tiny fields and
untidy hedgerows unchanged since Elgar’s time. At my feet,
gorse, bracken and comfrey quiver in time to the music. When
I look up, even the grey clouds are dancing. Elgar fills the
universe.
I have never worn headphones out of doors before, and I
have chosen a perfect day to borrow my son’s iPod, for I am
listening to the very music Sir Edward Elgar heard as he
walked along this dramatic escarpment. Elgar liked to
compose in the open air. He would stride for hours in the
Malvern hills, forming compositions in his head, and
returning home at night to write them down. “This music is
what I hear all day,” he told a friend. “The trees are
singing my music - or have I sung theirs?“
Walking along the undulating nine-mile ridge of the
Malvern hills is like striding along the back of a whale,
its rugged shanks falling almost vertically to the towns,
villages, patchwork fields and light industrial sprawl of
the Severn plain on one side, and to the less populated
hills of Herefordshire on the other. At the southern end of
the ridge, ancient entrenchments and fortifications surround
the square-topped Herefordshire Beacon. I lie in a sheltered
dip of coarse, rabbit-cropped grass, and listen to Elgar’s
Caractacus cantata, which was inspired by this prehistoric
British Camp.
Well-worn, sandy tracks lead back along the edge of the
escarpment to an ancient spring - the Holy Well - from which
water has been bottled since 1662. Tasting strong and
medicinal, this water once attracted high society to
Malvern. The imposing building below, now part of Malvern
Girls’ College, was a grand spa hotel, with a private tunnel
linking it to the railway station.
I stride down to Wyche Cutting, where a road slices
through the rocky crest, and up again to the Pinnacle and
Perseverance Peaks, my steps keeping time with the Pomp and
Circumstance Marches. Finally, I reach the Worcestershire
Beacon, the highest point of the Malvern hills. The city of
Worcester comes into view - its square cathedral tower
marking a focal point in Elgar’s life, and, indeed, in mine.
I was born in Worcester, almost 100 years after Elgar’s
birth. My father, the cathedral organist, taught singing at
Malvern, and my mother and the four children would sometimes
accompany him in the Hillman, for a picnic on the Beacon
while he was teaching. I haven’t been to the Beacon since I
was five, but it hasn’t changed at all - the short, scratchy
turf, the sandy paths and grey shingle, the bright, prickly
gorse, the vertical drop to tiny roofs and chimneypots
below. My most vivid and dramatic memory involves a circular
tin of homemade jellies, in round paper cases. As my mother
opened the tin, it flew out of her hands, and tin, lid and
jellies all rolled away down a precipice, never to be seen
again. As the Enigma Variations play in my ears, I think
about that summer afternoon half a century ago, and then I
picture Elgar himself, moustachioed and besuited, standing
at this very spot just twenty-five or thirty years earlier.
Elgar and his wife Alice spent much of their married life
near the Malvern Hills and it was here, in a series of
rented houses, that Elgar composed many of his major works.
After Alice’s death in 1920, Elgar returned here
permanently. Several houses can claim a connection with
England’s best known composer, and the hotel where I am
staying is one. The Cottage in the Wood, run by the friendly
Pattin family, consists of a Georgian dower-house and
several cottages, perched on the Malvern hillside,
overlooking 30-mile views of the Severn vale, where the
river glistens beneath huge skies. In the first-floor study
of a neighbouring house, Elgar looked out on this same
inspirational vista, and here, between 1899 and 1904, he
composed The Dream of Gerontius, Cockaigne, The Apostles,
Pomp and Circumstance Marches 1 and 2, The Coronation Ode,
and In the South. He also taught music to young ladies at
Wells House School in a now-derelict building at the bottom
of the hotel drive. My room is in a new annexe, built on the
site of a coach house which was used, 100 years ago, as a
recital room - and where Elgar performed on the violin.
The hotel has a video library, and that evening I watch
the dramatised biography of Elgar by Ken Russell, (who once
stayed at this hotel). Though the film is now over 40 years
old, it has worn well. Elgar’s music accompanies black and
white vignettes, with the Malvern hills as a recurring
backdrop. At the end, vintage cine film shows Elgar shortly
before his death in 1934, emerging from Worcester cathedral,
sitting in his garden, and playing with his dogs.
Next morning I listen to The Dream of Gerontius, as I
drive a mile south from the hotel to St Wulstan’s church,
nestling on the hillside below the village of Little
Malvern. Here, in a tranquil corner of the churchyard
surrounded by fields and meadows, are the graves of Elgar,
his wife and their daughter, Carice.
I motor on along the well-signed Elgar Route, past houses
that he and his wife rented, and schools where he taught
music, past the homes of friends who were portrayed in his
Enigma Variations, through the elegant Georgian streets of
Great Malvern to the commons, meadows and lanes where he
loved to bicycle.
Elgar was born in 1857, in a modest red-brick house at
Lower Broadheath. When he was two, the family moved to
Worcester, three miles away, but Elgar remained attached to
this rural cottage with its views of the Malvern hills, and
on being created a baronet, chose the title of Sir Edward
Elgar of Broadheath. The cottage still backs on to fields,
but, today, with a new building next door, it houses the
official Elgar Birthplace Museum. I don headphones again to
listen to the audio-guide, which weaves excerpts of Elgar’s
music between stories of how, as a child, he taught himself
to play the instruments in his father’s music shop, and how,
as an adult, he struggled for recognition. As I buy a video
of Ken Russell’s film, Elgar’s face looks out from my
twenty-pound note, with Worcester cathedral beside him.
On my way home, I stop the car and get out. Across the
dead-flat countryside, the Malvern hills tower like a giant
wall along the horizon - a massive ridge rising almost
vertically out of the plain, with a sprinkle of whitewashed
houses along its lower slopes. Dark clouds scud overhead,
making the wooded hillsides and bald peaks glow and then
blacken. As Elgar’s poignant and beautiful Salut d’Amour
plays from the car, the clouds move and the Beacon is once
again resplendent in golden sunshine.
First published by the Telegraph
©SarahShuckburgh
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