This week I returned to the Cobbe Collection at Hatchlands Park with my friend and pianist colleague Elspeth Wyllie, to see and play a square piano which had belonged to Elgar. Elspeth has been working on and performing Elgar’s own transcription for piano of his Enigma Variations and so the visit was part curiosity (on both our parts) and part research.

The first thing which struck us on being shown the piano is its very small size, and the delicate strings and hammers. Examining this tiny piano, it was easy to imagine it in a room in the composer’s cottage in Great Malvern. The piano came into the possession of Edward Elgar’s father and uncle who together ran a piano business in Worcester, and Elgar chose it from his father’s stock. He inscribed on the soundboard the names of some of the works he composed on it, including ‘Caractacus’ and ‘Sea Pictures’. The Enigma Variations were composed in 1898-99: of course we don’t know if Elgar used this piano to work on the Variations, but in any case, the experience of playing his music on his piano was most enlightening and very touching, for both of us.

Despite its size, the piano has a remarkably colourful voice and a rich bass. In the treble there are string quartet sonorities which brought a wonderful vibrancy to the music and revealed strands of melody, sub-melody and accompaniment which are sometimes lost in the lush resonance of a modern grand piano.

Hear Elgar’s Broadwood here:

 

More about The Cobbe Collection

An earlier post about the ‘Chopin’ pianos at the Cobbe Collection