Elgar’s Piano Quintet in A Minor: The Ghosts of Brinkwells
In 1918, the 61-year-old Edward Elgar was in the autumn of his career as a composer. The famous “Enigma” Variations had been written 20 years earlier, and Elgar’s output during the First World War consisted mostly of patriotic music. Once popular, the aging composer was now regarded as a regressive Romantic when compared with Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Ravel. Industrial slaughter in the trenches changed the nature of music. The world Elgar had know …