The trio of Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 is the sound of the British establishment, yet Edward Elgar was a self-taught, working-class Catholic outsider who felt like a failure until his forties. Born near Worcester in 1857 to a piano tuner who ran a sheet music shop, he could not afford the Leipzig Conservatory and instead built his own education from instruction books, cathedral scores, and playing violin and bassoon in local ensembles. At 22 he became conductor and arranger for the staff band at the Powick lunatic asylum, learning orchestration by making a mismatched collection of instruments work.

We follow his marriage to Alice Roberts, a general’s daughter who was disinherited for marrying him and who became his manager, secretary, and emotional anchor. Her belief paid off in 1899 with the Enigma Variations, 14 musical portraits of friends built around a hidden theme that is never played. We cover the Anglican backlash against The Dream of Gerontius and Richard Strauss’s public defense, the knighthood and Land of Hope and Glory, his Birmingham lectures calling English music white, the trauma of World War I, and the under-rehearsed 1919 premiere of the Cello Concerto. After Alice’s death in 1920, Elgar turned to horse racing, Wolverhampton Wanderers, backyard chemistry, and the gramophone, conducting at the 1931 opening of Abbey Road Studios.

• Why missing out on Leipzig may have saved Elgar from stylistic dogma
• How counterpoint lets a whole work be built around an absent melody
• The conductor who hogged rehearsal time and doomed the Cello Concerto premiere
• How the moving coil microphone changed what an orchestra could sound like on record
• What Elgar’s own fast, fiery recordings reveal about how he wanted his music played