Elgar Quotes

We'll win, of course," he said. "You don't want that," said the demon. "Why not, pray?“ “Listen," said Crowley desperately, "how many musicians do you think your side have got, eh? First grade, I mean." Aziraphale looked taken aback. "Well, I should think-" he began. "Two," said Crowley. "Elgar and Liszt. That's all. We've got the rest. Beethoven, Brahms, all the Bachs, Mozart, the lot. Can you imagine eternity with Elgar?

Fear was a wonderful propellant, and such a strong exponent of survival, even at the cost of others. Civility, it seemed, was the first to perish in a disaster.

My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us, the world is full of it and you simply take as much as you require.

In the smoky firelight the two old men nodded off like a pair of ancient kings passing the aeons in their tumuli. Made a musical notation of their snores. Elgar is to be played by a bass tuba, Ayrs a bassoon.

Caratacus suffered the double indignity of being taken to Rome in chains and having an opera written about him by Elgar.

Some things in life could not be solved or even contemplated by a rational mind. Roger’s mind, however, had ceased being anywhere near rational about half a bottle of Grand Marnier ago.

Oh God, please, I have to, please, just once more; I have to see her again. He marched onwards, his crippled leg dragging behind; his good leg hauling his exhausted body through the kind of pain he didn’t think existed. He reached out, grasped clumps of hope with bloodied hands, and pulled himself onwards.

The bullet smashed through the right lens of Winston’s glasses and slammed him back against the lounge wall. Ozzy was expressionless as his old friend slid down the wall leaving a smear of red behind him. Above his creased body, a gob of pale tissue clung onto the light switch. “Aw, Winston,” he said, “you did have a brain after all!

The musical equivalent of St Pancras Station. (on Elgar)

My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us, the world is full of it and you simply take as much as you require.” Edward Elgar 1857 – 1934

There was a strange happening during a performance of Elgar's 'Sea Pictures' at a concert hall in Bermuda tonight, when the man playing the triangle disappeared.

Orang yang sedang menderita nggak melulu butuh dukungan. Kadang...yang mereka butuhkan adalah orang yang sama-sama memiliki penderitaan seperti mereka. Elgar

I went to give this back to the—the lady. She wasn’t there, but you left Elgar.” I snatched the pieces from Jurij’s hands. “You went back to the shack? What were you going to say? ‘Sorry we were spying on you pretending you were a monster, thanks for the dirty old rag?

Gandalf as Ring-Lord would have been far worse than Sauron. He would have remained ‘righteous’, but self-righteous. He would have continued to rule and order things for ‘good’, and the benefit of his subjects according to his wisdom (which was and would have remained great). [The draft ends here. In the margin Tolkien wrote: ‘Thus while Sauron multiplied [illegible word] evil, he left “good” clearly distinguishable from it. Gandalf would have made good detestable and seem evil.’] Letter 246 From a letter to Mrs Eileen Elgar (drafts)

Learning how to play an instrument has always been near the top of my to-do list, but what are the chances now? There's little downtime with a column and a two-year-old, and after reading Goldilocks and the three Bears and going through half a bottle of wine with dinner on an average evening, imagining a day when I join Nathaniel on the Elgar Cello Concerto is not a vision but a hallucination. I'm at the point where the things on your to-do list get transferred to a should-have-done list, and one reason I write a column is for the privilege of vicariously sampling other worlds, dropping in with my passport, my notebook and my curiosity.

Israel was thinking of warm beer, and muffins, and Wensleydale cheese, and Wallace and Gromit, and the music of Elgar, and the Clash, and the Beatles, and Jarvis Cocker, and the white cliffs of Dover, and Big Bend, and the West End, and Stonehenge, and Alton Towers, and the Last Night of the Proms, and Glastonbury, and William Hogarth, and William Blake, and Just William, and Winston Churchill, and the North Circular Road, and Grodzinski's for coffee, and rubbish, and potholes, and a slice of Stilton and a pickled onion, and George Orwell. And Gloria, of course. He was almost home to Gloria. G-L-O-R-I-A.

Naquela noite, enquanto esperava (bordando, vendo a neve cair, ouvindo Chopin e Elgar) que meu inglês apaixonado e instável aparecesse, eu de repente me conscientizei de como a música me parecia clara e tocante; como era de uma beleza extrema e melancólica o fato de eu observar a neve e esperar por ele. Eu estava sentindo mais beleza, mas também mais tristeza de verdade. Quando ele surgiu - elegante, acabando de chegar de um jantar de cerimônia, de smoking, com uma echarpe de seda branca jogada de qualquer jeito em volta do pescoço e uma garrafa de champanhe na mão - pus para tocar a sonata póstuma para piano em si-bemol, D. 960, de Schubert. Seu erotismo belíssimo e obsessivo me encheu de emoção e me fez chorar. Chorei pela contundência de toda a emoção que eu havia perdido sem saber, e chorei pelo prazer de voltar a vivenciá-la. Até hoje, não consigo ouvir essa obra sem me sentir cercada pela linda tristeza daquela noite, pelo amor que eu tinha o privilégio de conhecer e pela lembrança do equilíbrio precário que existe entre a sanidade e um sufocamento sutil e terrível dos sentidos.

Are you chuckling yet? Because then along came you. A big, broad meat eater with brash blond hair and ruddy skin that burns at the beach. A bundle of appetites. A full, boisterous guffaw; a man who tells knock know jokes. Hot dogs - not even East 86th Street bratwurst but mealy, greasy big guts that terrifying pink. Baseball. Gimme caps. Puns and blockbuster movies, raw tap water and six-packs. A fearless, trusting consumer who only reads labels to make sure there are plenty of additives. A fan of the open road with a passion for his pickup who thinks bicycles are for nerds. Fucks hard and talks dirty; a private though unapologetic taste for porn. Mysteries, thrillers, and science fiction; a subscription to National Geographic. Barbecues on the Fourth of July and intentions, in the fullness of time, to take up golf. Delights in crappy snack foods of ever description: Burgles. Curlies. Cheesies. Squigglies - you're laughing - but I don't eat them - anything that looks less like food than packing material and at least six degrees of separation from the farm. Bruce Springsteen, the early albums, cranked up high with the truck window down and your hair flying. Sings along, off-key - how is it possible that I should be endeared by such a tin ear?Beach Boys. Elvis - never lose your roots, did you, loved plain old rock and roll. Bombast. Though not impossibly stodgy; I remember, you took a shine to Pearl Jam, which was exactly when Kevin went off them...(sorry). It just had to be noisy; you hadn't any time for my Elgar, my Leo Kottke, though you made an exception for Aaron Copeland. You wiped your eyes brusquely at Tanglewood, as if to clear gnats, hoping I didn't notice that "Quiet City" made you cry. And ordinary, obvious pleasure: the Bronx Zoo and the botanical gardens, the Coney Island roller coaster, the Staten Island ferry, the Empire State Building. You were the only New Yorker I'd ever met who'd actually taken the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. You dragged me along once, and we were the only tourists on the boat who spoke English. Representational art - Edward Hopper. And my lord, Franklin, a Republican. A belief in a strong defense but otherwise small government and low taxes. Physically, too, you were such a surprise - yourself a strong defense. There were times you were worried that I thought you too heavy, I made so much of your size, though you weighed in a t a pretty standard 165, 170, always battling those five pounds' worth of cheddar widgets that would settle over your belt. But to me you were enormous. So sturdy and solid, so wide, so thick, none of that delicate wristy business of my imaginings. Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches. How luck we are, when we've spared what we think we want! How weary I might have grown of all those silly pots and fussy diets, and how I detest the whine of sitar music!

Mr Van Huyten tells me to have patience with music and it’ll all open out like a big flower some day. ‘Why do they make it so hard to listen to?’ I ask him one night when we’re coming back from a Hallé concert in St George’s Hall in Bradford. ‘But they don’t set out to do that, Victor,’ he says. ‘That’s just the point. These popular tunes that you have in the… what do you call it – the Hit Parade? They’re so simple they go in one ear and out the other. How long do they last? A few weeks, or a month or two at the most. But this is music which endures for hundreds of years. It will be listened to as long as men live. Can you expect music of that stature to have the immediate appeal of a popular song? Someone once said that great art doesn’t reveal all its secrets at one glance. Be patient, let it work on you, let it flow over you. One day you’ll hear the most glorious music where you now hear only a din. You’ll hear it all, Victor, I hope. The thunder and majesty of Beethoven, the grace and tragic beauty of Mozart, the glorious singing of Brahms, the noble sadness of Elgar. It’s like a wonderful voyage of discovery, Victor, with magic over every horizon. Here is all the music in the world just waiting for you to find it. How I wish I could go back fifty years and discover it all afresh!

The military band did not make things easier. Having detected a larger than usual turnout of British travelers, and waiting with some infernal clairvoyance until Cyprian thought he had a grip on himself, just as he turned to bid Yashmeen a breezy arrivederci, they began to play an arrangement for brass of ‘Nimrod’ – what else? – from Elgar’s Enigma Variations. Teutonic bluntness notwithstanding, at the first major-seventh chord, an uncertainty of pitch among the trumpets contributing its touch of unsought innocence, Cyprian felt the tap opening decisively. It was difficult to tell what Yashmeen was thinking as she offered her lips. He was concentrating on not getting her vestee wet. The music took them for an instant in its autumnal envelope, shutting out the tourist chatter, the steam horns and quayside traffic, in as honest an expression of friendship and farewell as the Victorian heart had ever managed to come up with, until finally, the band moved mercifully on to ‘La Gazza Ladra.’ It wasn’t till Yashmeen nodded and released him that Cyprian realized they had been holding each other.

... my dad's silence from behind his newspaper becoming another presence in the room...

I wonder as I always do with new patients who she is, what her laugh sounds like, what she had planned to do today. Maybe she should have been meeting a friend for coffee right now. Even with the bruises, the cuts and her broken fingers, she doesn't look like she belongs here. She looks like she's pretending.

A tube runs from the back of her blond head where the neurosurgeon drilled into her skull to insert a temporary probe in the cavity to monitor the inter-cranial pressure and swelling around her brain.

She's about to lift her fist to knock against the window, but she pauses because the person sitting next to Jack is stroking her husband's leg with beautiful long white fingers. Jack looks down at his leg and interlaces his fingers with the woman's. She pulls him towards her and he gives in easily. Cassie watches, paralyzed, as they come together in a way that looks inevitable, the pressure too great to not put their lips together, for his hands not to hold her face as he kisses it, her red hair cascading between his fingers like lava. He's kissed Cassie like that so many times. She touches her face, almost expecting to feel his hands there, where they should be, holding her face, not holding [the woman's]. Cassie can't move. It's as though her mind has been cleaved clean away from her body. She watches them push and pull against each other, watches as [the woman] smiles behind her kissing mouth and her fingers fall to Jack's fly, like they've been there before. Cassie's heart dilates and contracts painfully, like the organ itself has been thumped hard. The force shoves her backwards, and she grips the window frame to stop herself falling.

The darkness seems to pull her towards it, holding her in a freezing embrace as she moves down the lane and deeper into the treacle-thick night. The air electrocutes her lungs with each icy inhale, and her legs feel slick, sure of their new direction. She hears the stream bubbling by her side and the branches from the silver birch trees creak over her head like arthritic fingers knitting together. The moon shines its mottled, kindly face, silvering her path like a fairy godmother; she smiles up at it before it vanishes again behind a fast-moving cloud. She feels entirely of the world; it moves easily along with her, as though some invisible force has, with a small sigh, been released within her, and she's in step with life. She starts to hum, surprising herself, something made-up, childlike; it's nonsense but she doesn't care and she doesn't feel ashamed. Why didn't she notice before how smooth the world can be?

The flash of the car lights from behind startles her, like they're intruding on her private moment and have caught her doing something no one else should see. The car is familiar. She waves, casting shadows on the lane, her arms preposterously long. She breaks into a little run; the lane widens ahead, they can stop and talk there. But it's as though running has caught the car's attention-exposed some weakness in her-and she feels as if the car lights have locked onto her back with an animalistic ferocity, like the glazed eyes of a wild animal in a trance of instinct, nostrils full of prey. She feels the lights coming faster and faster, galloping towards her. A scream rips from her throat, but the wind whips her voice away, as if it's needed elsewhere, at another drama. The car growls, so close behind her now.

I ordered a third pint, skillfully avoiding eye contact with the barman when Ange arrived. It had been four months since I last saw her. Four months since she'd got the phone call from the police. I'd been gone a week, and had ended up under Waterloo Bridge, apparently trying to find a building site I thought I was managing. I'd been out of work for a year. Without a word she drove me to a cheap hotel in Worthing, a few miles from home. She'd already dumped my clothes inside. In the Green Man, Ange's blonde hair was longer than I remembered. I wanted to tell her she looked pretty but she curled her lip when she saw me, as if I smelt bad, and she didn't look pretty anymore.

You're somethin' else, Hel. Know that? Dodged the sea toad, got rescued off that damned comet, bisected ol' Bron Elgar like a bagel out there on Cravat ... How the hell you get away from those damn fish down in the Glory Hole? Man, you got more lives than a New York alleycat.

I’d like to be excused now.” I stood up. Half-a-dozen specters surrounded me on either side before I could take one step. “Sit down,” said the lord behind the black curtain. “Please.” I did not. “I’m not feeling well,” I said through clenched teeth. “You have not eaten enough. Food will improve your temper.” A few well-placed stabs from Elgar the Blade to his abdomen might “improve my temper.

I'd been thinking about how close Jack and his mum seemed, their love for each other active and unashamed. But then, that's what tends to happen, loved ones rally for the initial drama, attracted to the shock, and then slowly people wander away, disinterested in the long grind towards rehabilitation.

I’ll give it my best. I will not be a liability, but I won’t be cannon fodder either. Don’t make me tell you all to fuck off. I don’t like saying ‘fuck off,’ much less actually meaning that you can fuck off, but if fuck off you must, then fuck off you will. I consider you all to be my friends, of which I don’t have very many. Don’t make me tell you to fuck off. It would hurt me more than you fuck-offs.” Rivka’s mouth fell open. Red stared. Lindy smiled. Jay and Floyd giggled. Lindy was the first to speak. “You fit right in, Doc. Dump your gear, and we’ll set you up with body armor.” “Chaz,” Rivka started, “take us out, please. Destination is Elgar 7.” “Body armor?” Tyler asked. “Body armor,” Red confirmed.

The men repeatedly request that she play Elgar’s “Nimrod” even though it appears to affect them powerfully. She finds it hard to watch them fight to maintain their composure as the kettledrums roll and the score ascends to its heights. It must cause them something close to agony. Perhaps, she thinks, that is what they require: something that allows them to follow their pain as it rises, in its most beautifully orchestrated form— one that insists on the inevitability of whatever will come, and then releases them, gently, with that knowledge. It is not comfort it gives them, she realizes, but acceptance; not an anaesthetizing of sorrow, but a clear articulation of it,

Ange has a boyfriend, a boyfriend called Craig. Strange, the simple sentence doesn't appal me, doesn't even surprise me that much. I imagine insurance man Craig, a lumpy face, the color of porridge, pulling his double chin away from the collar of a cheap polyester suit and I hope he'll succeed where I failed again and again. I wonder if he'll be able to make Ange happy, lift a life full of disappointment. I wonder if he can make Ange's mouth so often pursed as a tight knot finally loosen into a long-lost smile. I hope so. I'd like to think she could be happy; it would be good for Lucy to see her mum happy.

Most people don’t get it at all. They think they can fix things with tea and sympathy and it’s like they’re pissed off with me that they can’t; they think it’s my fault somehow that they don’t make me feel better.

Elgar was writing the final bars of his Cello Concerto, his last major work, which conveys better than any words the unappeasable sadness of those days.

J. S. Bach’s Cello Suites, the Aria from the Goldberg Variations and the ‘Erbarme Dich’ from his St Matthew Passion; Chopin’s Nocturnes; Messiaen’s Quatour pour la Fin de Temps; Górecki’s Third Symphony – composers have always nourished the interlacing of beauty and sadness. Lyrics only add more melancholy content: Richard Strauss’s ‘Morgen’ and the Vier Letzte Lieder; Tom Waits’ Closing Time and the songs of Rufus Wainwright; Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius; the strains and pains of sex and death in Wagner’s

A CD of Elgar’s cello concerto, performed by Yo-Yo Ma and the London Symphony Orchestra.

The moment when it crystallized for me was in early 1999. Due to the vicissitudes of my freelancing schedule, I ended up playing Holst’s The Planets three times with three different orchestras in a six-month period. Maybe you know that piece. There are recycled versions of it in everything John Williams swiped for the Star Wars movies and everything bombastic and shallow you’ve ever been annoyed by in every action movie of the last twenty years, plus the horrible Phrygian raised fourth that was everywhere in early twentieth-century English classical music (I’m talking to you, Gordon Jacob, and you, Edward Elgar). The Planets, along with Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, had been grating on me more and more with each passing year of being a musician. Playing The Planets with three orchestras within a year, this time as clarinet two in the Modesto Symphony, made me realize that if I played it one more time, I would go on a rampage and hurt people with my clarinets. I needed a plan B, and coffee was all I could imagine.