Where Elgar Walked: Tracing a Festival Spirit

In this essay, Emre Aracı embarks on a deeply personal pilgrimage through the landscapes and memories of Edward Elgar’s Worcestershire. Prompted by the discovery of a faded 1910 letter bearing a dried violet and Elgar’s likeness, Aracı traces the composer’s life and legacy—from the banks of the River Severn to the streets of Worcester, the slopes of the Malvern Hills, and the quietude of St Wulstan’s churchyard. With poetic reverence, musical insight, and a collector’s eye for hidden detail, he evokes the spirit of Elgar not only as a composer, but as a kindred soul. This festival becomes, for Aracı, a solitary yet luminous celebration—an act of remembrance shaped by letters, landscapes, and lingering notes of a long-lost harmony.

A letter, dated “19 October 1910” in faint, delicate script, opened with the words “Mon Cher Ami.” It had been penned in French and pasted onto the back of a postcard, folded neatly as if to preserve its fragility. In the upper-left corner of the page, a dried violet—inscribed “1910” in ink now faded like the flower itself—had been affixed, and, remarkably, it had survived the passage of more than a century, clinging on like a whisper from the past. As I later read in the letter’s tender prose, the sender had discovered the violet pressed between the pages of a volume by Alfred de Musset and, hoping it might rekindle a habit of weekly correspondence “as before the holidays,” had attached it to the paper with that gentle encouragement. The letter, exchanged between two friends who had grown silent for reasons unknown, seemed to bloom once more—if only one-sidedly—with hope and affection through this enchanted floral token. How fitting to think that Shakespeare’s Duke Orsino likened the ephemeral scent of violets to the melancholy of music in Twelfth Night, and how apt that this postcard, preserved for decades, still bore within it the spectral trace of a lost harmony. For the image captured on that postcard was none other than the likeness of Sir Edward Elgar—a composer singularly attuned to the sensitivities of friendship and sorrow, whose very soul seemed capable of mending such a loss. As ever, he appeared composed and contemplative, assuming his role in this act of restoration with quiet dignity and profound awareness—just as naturally as a violet might fall between the pages of a book.

Letter bearing a dried violet, dated 1910, affixed to a postcard of Elgar (Collection of Emre ARACI)

It was this very postcard, I daresay, which beckoned me to Worcester for the Elgar Festival held during the first weekend of June 2024. Whilst in search of a new addition to my musical memorabilia, I had stumbled upon what felt like a spiritual treasure, and perhaps it was this long-lost friendship—wishing to be resurrected, even in imagination—that led me back to Elgar’s world after so many years. I say “back”, for I had first glimpsed the great composer’s modest birthplace in the village of Lower Broadheath during a brief sojourn in 2010, when I wrote about my impressions for the December issue of Andante magazine. That visit had left me without the opportunity to explore Worcester and the surrounding Malvern Hills more deeply. This time, however, I came prepared, armed with Michael Grundy’s out-of-print yet invaluable Elgar’s Beloved Country—a guide of rare charm, illustrated with photographs and anecdotes of the region that so inspired the composer. To this I later added Cora Weaver’s A Guide to Edward Elgar in Worcestershire, for what greater gift to the romantic wanderers of the twenty-first century than the means to trace a composer’s life through the landscapes that shaped it?

“I am still that dreaming child who longed for something tremendous,” Elgar wrote in 1921 to Sir Sidney Colvin, “still sitting among the reeds of the Severn with a scrap of paper, trying to set down sounds in my heart”. 

Swans on the River Severn (photo © Emre Aracı)

He was sixty-four years old. Grundy’s guide opens with that very image—Elgar, aged yet dreaming still—gazing across the river from Worcester Cathedral. And so, it was only fitting that my own journey should begin there as well. With its romantic stone bridge and gently gliding canal boats, the River Severn paints a scene of pastoral serenity. Rowers, strong and rhythmical, cut the water with athletic precision, while hundreds of swans drift by in a silent, natural choreography. As the deep tolling of the Gothic cathedral’s bells mingled in my ears with Sir Simon Rattle’s recording of The Dream of Gerontius, I sat on the riverbank steps encircled by reeds, unable to deny the presence—real or imagined—of Elgar’s spirit. For me, the festival began not in a concert hall but there, on that solitary bank, where the composer once sought to capture sounds upon paper. Might there be a grander overture to such an event?

Later that evening, I wandered into a narrow street off Worcester’s main thoroughfare—once home to Elgar’s father’s famed music shop, now lost to the brutal demolitions of the 1960s—and found myself face to face with the timbered façade of a lovely pub, King Charles II, dating from 1577. It seemed entirely plausible that Elgar himself would have known this inn. Seated beneath the flickering glow of a candle, I wrote in my ink-stained diary, the golden hue casting soft shadows on the page as if reaching across time from the Worcester Elgar knew and loved.

King Charles II House in Worcester (photo © Emre ARACI)

Elgar's 1905 postcard from Constantinople
(© Elgar Foundation)

The following day’s Elgar exhibition at the Guildhall—Worcester’s baroque town hall, dating from 1723—was nothing short of a visual feast. A personal highlight was a postcard Elgar sent to his daughter Carice during his 1905 visit to Constantinople, featuring a street peddler and a pack of stray dogs. Beneath the image, Elgar had scrawled with playful affection, “I love these bow wows”. And yet, as I recorded in my book Elgar in Turkey (Pera Museum Publications, 2014), he had privately lamented the nocturnal barking of Istanbul’s street dogs in his diary.

That evening, in the grandeur of the Guildhall, we heard Elgar’s String Quartet arranged for string orchestra, and on Saturday, 1 June, Zoe Beyers performed the Violin Concerto in a gala concert at Worcester Cathedral. Though the mighty building’s echoing acoustics made me long for a choral work, there was a fitting sanctity in hearing that piece—so vital to Elgar’s musical awakening—within the sacred space of his spiritual home. Tickets for the birthday luncheon hosted by the Elgar Foundation on 2 June, held at the Royal Worcester Porcelain Museum, alas, had long since sold out. I thus resolved, as I had at the festival’s start, to retreat into the private version of the Elgar Festival I had unconsciously been curating for myself all along.

How could I forget the moment I alighted at Great Malvern Station? Built in 1862, its cast-iron Corinthian columns adorned with painted flowers, and its genteel waiting room named for Lady Emily Foley, this station was one Elgar knew well. With its verdant outlooks and vistas stretching across the valley, Malvern serves as a geographical atlas of the composer’s life, and no fewer than fifty-nine sites in the area are associated with him—including, of course, his grave. Even the traffic signs reflect this legacy, directing visitors along the “Elgar Route”. Given that the town is also home to the factory and museum of the iconic Morgan motorcars, founded in 1910, and that this year’s festival had opened with a Morgan rally on 28 May, perhaps I ought to have toured the route in a British racing green Morgan from the 1930s. But, as ever, I chose to continue on foot, entrusting the rest to my imagination.

"I ought to have toured the Elgar route in a 1930s Morgan"

My first stop was “Forli,” the Elgars’ home at 37 Alexandra Road, where Edward lived with his wife Alice and daughter Carice from 1891. They named the house after the Italian Renaissance painter Melozzo da Forlì, famed for his musical angels. It was here, in this typical Victorian villa, that Elgar placed an advertisement in the local paper offering violin lessons. At that time, his career was still nascent; it was from “Forli” that he would compose the Enigma Variations, and from which he would depart, eight years later, a celebrated figure. Privately owned, the house changed hands only three years ago. Its new owner holds not merely a property, but the keys to a site where musical history was born. Gazing at its modest façade through the green of surrounding trees, I felt an inner peace at having come another step along Elgar’s path. 

“Might he have taken me on as a pupil, had I knocked upon that door?” I mused—before pressing on, still on foot, past the statue of Elgar in the square at Great Malvern, with a further eight miles yet to cover.

Passing the Gothic turrets of Malvern College, once attended by C. S. Lewis, and contemplating his imagined world of Narnia beneath the glow of old gas lamps, I soon stood before “Craeg Lea” on Wells Road. The Elgars moved here in 1899, naming it as an anagram of their initials and surname. From the red pillar-box, still bearing the cipher of Edward VII, Elgar must have posted countless letters. These small objects, still in use, are what keep history alive.

"I soon stood before “Craeg Lea” on Wells Road" (photo © Emre ARACI)

At last, I arrived at the Church of St Wulstan in Little Malvern, where Elgar lies buried with his wife and daughter. Amid birdsong, chickens scratching in the grass, and the hush of a secluded country churchyard in bloom, I felt closer to him than ever before. On Sunday 2 June 2024, the 167th anniversary of his birth to the day, there was a stillness at the Elgar family grave at the Church of St Wulstan, Little Malvern, that soothed. No music was played at his funeral, which took place on 23 February 1934, beneath a wintry morning mist. Fewer than twenty mourners attended; even the time and place had been discreetly shared. No black garb, no ceremony—only the view Elgar loved: the soul-uplifting nature of the Malvern Hills. As mourners dispersed, snow began to fall upon the fresh grave.

I believed, truly, that those flakes had turned into the white roses I laid upon it in the sunshine of this year’s spring. Just as I believed that the faded violet pressed into that 1910 letter—found between the pages of Musset and attached to a sepia portrait of Elgar—would forever preserve the memory of that lost friendship. 

And so, as I concluded my own personal Elgar Festival in solitude, under the gentle glow of the lanterns that lit the “Elgar Route”; I knew he had been with me every step of the way.

The Elgar family grave at the Church of St Wulstan, Little Malvern (photo © Emre ARACI)

Emre Aracı's article was originally published in Turkish under the title ‘Elgar Rotası'nda Özgün bir Festival Coşkusu’ in the August 2024 issue (No. 214) of Andante.

Link to the original article in Turkish

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