The Starlight Express by Edward Elgar Score - Sheet Music

Even by the standards of the Elgar Complete Edition, this is a ground-breaking volume. For some, the full score of Elgar’s incidental music to The Starlight Express, edited by Roger Dubois and published here in its entirety for the first time1, will be sufficient incentive to acquire their copy.\n\nBut painstaking months of editorial effort have resulted in a volume which offers so much more. Jerrold Northrop Moore’s close comparison of the score with the text of the play and his scrutiny of Elgar’s annotations on the composer’s copy of the play typescript have made it possible to delve behind the staves and come up with a word-by-word correlation of spoken dialogue and music. Features of Elgar’s score, meaningless when taken in isolation, are revealed to have a direct bearing on actions on stage, taking us much closer to the melodrama evolved in rehearsal, enacted during the production run of the play, and never recorded for posterity. And the composer’s typescript annotations have been assimilated to provide a fascinating insight into the development of the play and its characters in parallel with Elgar’s composition of the score, in part to meet musical and dramatic requirements, but also to comply with the financial realities of the production.\n\nUnusually for an academic edition, this volume places particular emphasis on performance aspects. The play has always suffered an unenthusiastic reception and contemporary press reviews make clear that the original production run at the Kingsway Theatre in London in January 1916 was doomed from the start. We shall never know how successful the play might have become had it been refined and revived the following Christmas, as was at one time suggested; but it is clear that subsequent radio broadcasts have handled the play unsympathetically. It is the sincere wish of the editors and publishers of this volume that the detailed insight it provides will stimulate further productions which recognise the composer’s intentions and bring out the subtleties of Elgar’s score.\n\n\n\n1 only the three Organ-grinder’s songs, one to introduce each act, have previously been published and these have a piano accompaniment not by Elgar but by Julius Harrison, who conducted the orchestra for the theatre run of the play.