The Windflower Letters (2nd Edition) by Edward Elgar Study Score - Sheet Music

SKU: ST.EWCII2

ISBN 9781904856566.

This volume in the Collected Correspondence series restores to print The Windflower Letters, Jerrold Northrop Moore’s remarkable account of the relationship between Elgar and Alice Stuart Wortley, told primarily through correspondence from Elgar to his Windflower. We can observe through Elgar’s own words their relationship gradually ripening from one of social acquaintance and admiration to an intimate involvement with the composition of some of his greatest masterpieces, not least the Violin Concerto. (We are deprived of Windflower’s view of the relationship through the loss of her letters to him, most likely destroyed out of a false sense of propriety.) Their relationship spanned three decades which saw Elgar’s greatest triumphs and his greatest griefs, from the height of his success in the first decade of the century, through the catastrophe of the First World War, to the years after the death of his wife Alice and the steep decline in his music’s popularity. The relationship is set against a brilliant background of Edwardian artistic and intellectual life: first nights by Shaw, Barrie, Pinero and Granville Barker; Royal Academy dinners; and private concerts by such intimates as Paderewski.nnThe correspondence contains some of Elgar’s finest letters. In the first edition of this volume, published by Oxford University Press in 1989, Dr Moore reduced around one hundred letters, mostly written after the death of his wife Alice in 1920, to a passing reference, recording the source location in a footnote. In this new edition, the text of these letters is published in full, in most cases for the first time, in an 80-page appendix. Throughout the volume, minor errors in the text have been corrected, and footnote references have been updated to record the relocation and recataloguing of sources in the twenty-five years since the publication of the first edition.nnAs the author of Elgar’s most extensive biography, Dr Moore needs no introduction to readers. His linking passages draw on the Elgar family diaries, extensive manuscript notes by the Stuart Wortleys’ daughter Clare, and recollections given to him by surviving members of the Stuart Wortley and Millais families.