Elgar: Keyboard Works

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Explore the complete catalog of Keyboard compositions by Elgar. This curated list includes composition years, historical Wikipedia context, and interactive audio to add specific tracks directly to your listening queue.

Title Year Actions
8 Vesper Voluntaries, for organ, op. 14

The table below shows all known compositions by Edward Elgar.

Adieu
Cantique, for organ, orchestra, or piano, op. 3

The table below shows all known compositions by Edward Elgar.

Chantant

The table below shows all known compositions by Edward Elgar.

Concert Allegro, op. 46

Edward Elgar's Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85, is a cornerstone of the solo cello repertoire. Elgar composed it in the aftermath of the First World War, when his music had already become out of fashion with the concert-going public. In contrast with Elgar's earlier Violin Concerto, which is lyrical and passionate, the Cello Concerto is for the most part contemplative and elegiac. The October 1919 premiere was a debacle because Elgar and the performers had been deprived of adequate rehearsal time. Elgar made two recordings of the work with Beatrice Harrison as soloist. Since then, leading cellists from Pablo Casals onward have performed the work in concert and in the studio, but the work did not achieve wide popularity until the 1960s, when a recording by Jacqueline du Pré caught the public imagination and became a classical best-seller.

Echo's Dance

The Dream of Gerontius, Op. 38, is a work for voices and orchestra in two parts composed by Edward Elgar in 1900, to text from the poem by John Henry Newman. It relates the journey of a pious man's soul from his deathbed to his judgment before God and settling into Purgatory. Elgar disapproved of the use of the term oratorio for the work (and the term occurs nowhere in the score), though his wishes are not always followed. The piece is widely regarded as Elgar's finest choral work, and some consider it his masterpiece. The work was composed for the Birmingham Music Festival of 1900; the first performance took place on 3 October 1900, in Birmingham Town Hall. It was badly performed at the premiere, but later performances in Germany revealed its stature. In the first decade after its premiere, the Roman Catholic theology in Newman's poem caused difficulties in getting the work performed in Anglican cathedrals, and a revised text was used for performances at the Three Choirs Festival until 1910.

Griffinesque

The table below shows all known compositions by Edward Elgar.

In Smyrna

İzmir is the third most populous city in Turkey, after Istanbul and Ankara. It is on the Aegean coast of Anatolia, and is the capital of İzmir Province. As of 2025 end of year estimate, İzmir Province has a total population of 4,504,184 while İzmir city is home to around 3.5 million inhabitants. It extends along the outlying waters of the Gulf of İzmir and inland to the north across the Gediz River Delta; to the east along an alluvial plain created by several small streams; and to slightly more rugged terrain in the south. İzmir's climate is Mediterranean. İzmir has more than 3,000 years of recorded urban history, and up to 8,500 years of history as a human settlement since the Neolithic period. In classical antiquity, the city was known as Smyrna – a name which remained in use in English and various other languages until around 1930, when government efforts led the original Greek name to be forcefully phased out internationally in favor of its Turkish counterpart İzmir. Lying on an advantageous location at the head of a gulf running down in a deep indentation, midway along the western Anatolian coast, İzmir has been one of the principal mercantile cities of the Mediterranean Sea for much of its history. Until the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey, İzmir had a very large Greek population. Present-day İzmir is an important port, and is home to multiple universities. It hosts the annual İzmir International Fair.

Loughborough Memorial Chime, for carillon

The Loughborough Carillon is a carillon tower and war memorial in Loughborough, England. It is in Queen's Park, and is a well-known landmark, visible from several miles away. It is 152 feet (46 m) high. Plans were finalised in 1919 and when completed in 1923 it was the first four-octave carillon in England, the concept being associated with Belgium where so many British servicemen lost their lives during the 1914–1918 Great War. The Carillon was designed by Sir Walter Tapper, and is now grade II listed. The carillon has 47 bells, all of which were cast at John Taylor Bell Foundry in Loughborough. The carillon was built by William Moss and Sons Ltd of Loughborough. The dedication was held on Sunday 22 July 1923, led by Theodore Woods, Bishop of Peterborough, and Field-Marshal William Robertson. The carillon was played by city carillonneur Jef Denyn, and the service included a piece Memorial Chimes composed by Edward Elgar for the occasion - the manuscript of which, donated to Charnwood Borough Council in the 1950s, was rediscovered in 2012. There are recitals every Thursday (1300 till 1400) and Sunday (1300 till 1400) throughout the summer. The Carillon is a grade II listed building.

May Song

Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet, ( ; 2 June 1857 – 23 February 1934) was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, concertos for violin and cello, and two symphonies. He also composed choral works, including The Dream of Gerontius, chamber music and songs. He was appointed Master of the King's Musick in 1924. Although Elgar is often regarded as a typically English composer, most of his musical influences were not from England but from continental Europe. He felt himself to be an outsider, not only musically, but socially. In musical circles dominated by academics, he was a self-taught composer; in Protestant Britain, his Roman Catholicism was regarded with suspicion in some quarters; and in the class-conscious society of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, he was acutely sensitive about his humble origins even after he achieved recognition. He nevertheless married the daughter of a senior British Army officer. She inspired him both musically and socially, but he struggled to achieve success until his forties, when after a series of moderately successful works his Enigma Variations (1899) became immediately popular in Britain and overseas. He followed the Variations with a choral work, The Dream of Gerontius (1900), based on a Roman Catholic text that caused some disquiet in the Anglican establishment in Britain, but it became, and has remained, a core repertory work in Britain and elsewhere. His later full-length religious choral works were well received but have not entered the regular repertory. In his fifties, Elgar composed a symphony and a violin concerto that were immensely successful. His second symphony and his cello concerto did not gain immediate public popularity and took many years to achieve a regular place in the concert repertory of British orchestras. Elgar's music came, in his later years, to be seen as appealing chiefly to British audiences. His stock remained low for a generation after his death. It began to revive significantly in the 1960s, helped by new recordings of his works. Some of his works have, in recent years, been taken up again internationally, but the music continues to be played more in Britain than elsewhere. Elgar has been described as the first composer to take the gramophone seriously. Between 1914 and 1925, he conducted a series of acoustic recordings of his works. The introduction of the moving-coil microphone in 1923 made far more accurate sound reproduction possible, and Elgar made new recordings of most of his major orchestral works and excerpts from The Dream of Gerontius.

Minuet, op. 21

The table below shows all known compositions by Edward Elgar.

Organ Sonata no. 1 in G major, op. 28

The Sonata in G major, Op. 28 is Edward Elgar's only sonata composed for the organ and was first performed on 8 July 1895. It also exists in an arrangement for full orchestra made after Elgar's death.

Pastourelle

The table below shows all known compositions by Edward Elgar.

Salut d'amour, op. 12

Salut d'Amour (Liebesgruß), Op. 12, is a musical work composed by Edward Elgar in 1888, originally written for violin and piano.

Serenade

The Serenade for String Orchestra in E minor, Op. 20, is an early piece in three short movements, by Edward Elgar. It was written in March 1892 as a present to his wife, Alice on the occasion of their third wedding anniversary that year and first performed privately in that year; its public premiere was in 1896. It became one of Elgar's most popular compositions, and has been recorded many times.

Skizze

The table below shows all known compositions by Edward Elgar.