In an outstanding display of craftsmanship Ken Russell with a small budget and skeleton crew do a superb job in giving life an energy to this documentary on the life of composer Edward Elgar. From it's striking opening of a young Elgar riding his horse across the bucolic Worcester, England countryside to the sober partnering of "Hope and Glory" with WW 1 newsreel footage Russell vividly evokes the man and the times by seamlessly infusing his music into the striking imagery creating a tight rhythm dictated by the music. Elgar was a self taught musician who worked in his father's music store, eventually dabbling in composing, content to let life take its course when he marries and his wife becomes his biggest booster and promoter. The career takes off as he first finds success in Germany then back in GB as Hope and Glory becomes GBs second national anthem especially during the Great War. Elgar eventually has mixed feelings about its jingoistic tone and retreats from society where the widowed composer lives his days out with a pack of dogs that his wife would not let him own or have in the house after they married.Russell does wonders with the little material he has (Elgar was very private) as he economically moves his story forward, raising the tenor of narration with strong sober compositions and wonderful pastoral shots of the nature loving Elgar the music speaking for him as he rides his pony, bicycle, automobile about the Malvern Hills. There are also some other excellent cost cutting and efficient moves such as conveying Elgar's smashing tour in Germany by way of post cards and the brilliantly staged and edited scene at the Opening of Wembley in 1934 where Elgar detaches himself from Pomp and Circumstance for the last time. Free of his extravagant excess Elgar may well be Ken Russell's most accessible work, it certainly is one of his better ones when you consider the threadbare budget.

The music of Edward Elgar enjoyed immense popularity in Britain for a relatively brief period during the 1900s and 1910s, but by the time of his death in 1934 it was already starting to fall out of favour. The patriotic nature of pieces like the "Pomp and Circumstance Marches" meant that it enjoyed an even briefer revival during the war, but by 1962, when this documentary was made, Elgar was once again an unfashionable composer. He was associated by many people with jingoism and with nostalgia for the glory days of an Empire from which in the early sixties the British were fast retreating.Even in the sixties, however, there were some who realised that Elgar deserved to be regarded as far more than a cultural hero of the League of Empire Loyalists. Among these were Huw Wheldon, the producer and editor of the BBC's arts programme "Monitor" and a young director named Ken Russell who were together responsible for this film. It was innovative in a number of ways. It was the first time that a British television programme showed one long film about an artistic subject instead of a number of short items. Russell and Weldon eschewed the "talking heads" style of documentary, even though in 1962, less than thirty years after Elgar's death, there would doubtless have been many people still alive who remembered him in his later years. Instead the programme used actors to portray Elgar, his wife Alice and other figures from his life, although there is no spoken dialogue. The only voice we hear is that of Wheldon, who acted as both writer and narrator. (Russell wanted the actors to speak, but was overruled on this point).Wheldon and Russell were keen to get away from the prevailing view of Elgar as a bombastic, jingoistic composer of cheap music, a second-rater elevated by the British musical establishment to first-rate status out of misguided cultural nationalism. (From one comment on this board I note that this ignorant and prejudiced view is still not quite dead). To do this they concentrated less on the "Pomp and Circumstance" side of his music than on its more emotional, sensitive and pastoral side. Elgar was a complex man, with many different sides to his character, and these are reflected in his works. We therefore hear extracts from the reflective Second Symphony, the autumnal, elegiac Cello Concerto (written as a response to the death of Alice Elgar and the slaughter of the First World War) and the deeply religious "Death of Gerontius". (Russell said that he had a particular empathy with Elgar's music because, like the composer, he was a Catholic) I will not deny that Russell's style of film-making could, at times, be characterised by excessive flamboyance, his Tchaikovsky biopic "The Music Lovers" being a case in point. "Elgar", however, is not a film of that type. Indeed, by comparison with most of his work for the cinema it is remarkably chaste. Its most striking visual feature is Russell's restrained yet beautiful black-and-white photography of the Malvern Hills, something which together with Wheldon's mellifluous commentary gives the film its distinctive character."Elgar" was instrumental in launching Ken Russell's career as a director. He had a deep love of Classical music and was to make several more dramatised biographies of composers, Debussy, Delius and Richard Strauss for television and Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Liszt for the cinema. The film was also credited with contributing to a revival of interest in Elgar's music, although another factor was the advocacy of musicians such as Adrian Boult and John Barbirolli who had remained loyal to the composer even when he was out of critical favour. (Barbirolli's legendary recording of the Cello Concerto with Jacqueline du Pre was made three years after this film). In its stylistic innovations, its establishing its director as a major talent and its role in helping to revive interest in a great composer, "Elgar" can be regarded as one of the most influential arts documentaries ever made. 9/10

While considered something of a breakthrough in British TV, coming early in the director's career, he wasn't allowed to use actors in his film on composer Sir Edward Elgar other than in long shot or have them speak! Despite this fact (and noting also that none of Russell's subsequent trademark excesses are to be found here), I was surprisingly engrossed in it regardless. Incidentally, in the accompanying audio commentary, it's revealed that some of the episodes depicted (or mentioned in the almost-constant narration) had no real basis in fact – with the director readily admitting that he had to fabricate much of it simply because there just wasn't that much known about Elgar at the time to begin with! Russell makes good use of stock footage, ably juxtaposing military/royal parade with the horrors of war (Elgar lived through both the Boer conflict and the First World War). Besides, he doesn't beat around the bush and repeatedly states that Elgar's talent was all but appreciated in his homeland and that the composer himself would eventually come to somewhat begrudge the fact that his best-known piece was the stirring yet ultra-jingoistic "Land Of Hope And Glory" (so popular that it was virtually held as a second national anthem for Great Britain while, as Russell explains in the commentary, this music is played at the graduation ceremony of every school in America)! When all is said and done, however, the film is at its most effective during the lyrical passages in the countryside.

Elgar was made by three people: Ken Russell, Humphrey Burton and Huw Wheldon. All three liked Elgar's music and all three thought him under-rated. They set about, with the aid of legendary researcher Anne James, to gather as much information about the great Edwardian as possible, and soon they had vast amounts of material with which they could tell the story of Elgar's life. Russell and Wheldon fought their famous battle about the role of actors - which, contrary to general opinion, both won - but both Wheldon and Russell and Humphrey Burton were not happy with what they had. It was Burton who finally said what all were thinking - that they were not telling the right story. The right story was not the story of Elgar but the story of Elgar's music. Burton and Russell spent a week doing nothing but listening to Elgar and emerged with a 50 minute soundtrack including snippets short and long. Now they set about making pictures to go with the music. In other words the music was not an accompaniment, the music was the thing itself. The pictures illustrated it. Speaking actors would have shifted the balance of the film back towards words and pictures. The power of 'Elgar' lies in the primacy it gives to the composer's music. Often referred to as 'Ken Russell's 'Elgar'', this film is actually Elgar's Elgar, and therein lies its claim for legendary status.