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I can’t remember when I first heard this piece, but it was almost certainly on BBC Radio Three’s Breakfast programme and, as is often the way, the piece caught my attention and I decided to find out more about it.

My score has the date “September 2013” inscribed on the inside cover, which means I purchased the sheet music just a month after I took delivery of my 1913 Bechstein model A grand piano. A few months prior to this, I visited the Cobbe Collection, a fascinating collection of historic keyboard instruments, and had the opportunity to play a square piano which had belonged to Edward Elgar. 

(Image: The Cobbe Collection)

Elgar composed Dream Children in 1902, so my piano is almost contemporary with the piece. Originally written for small orchestra, the work offers a glimpse into the composer’s more introspective and poetic side. The transcription for solo piano highlights the music’s delicate lyricism and nostalgic in a more intimate setting. The work’s reflective mood and gentle expressiveness make it one of Elgar’s most personal and touching miniatures.

The title Dream Children comes from an essay by Charles Lamb, “Dream Children: A Reverie,” published in 1822. In that essay, Lamb imagines telling stories to his children – who, by the end, are revealed to be only figments of his imagination, the children he might have had with his lost love, Alice. Elgar was deeply moved by Lamb’s bittersweet meditation on memory, loss, and the power of dreams, and he translated those emotions into music with remarkable sensitivity.

The piece consists of two short movements. The first, marked Andante, unfolds like a tender lullaby. Scored in 12/8, it has the feeling of a gentle barcarolle with a simple and songlike melody evoking the innocence of childhood and the wistful beauty of remembered joy. The music rarely leaves the pp and ppp dynamic range, except for bar 8 where there is a moment of drama marked molto lento, leading to a sustained g minor chord. Elgar emphasises the tender wistfulness of the piece through the use of rubato, ritardandos and pauses. At the very end, a single modulation through the introduction of a B natural in the bass brings the piece to an close on a hopeful, literally uplifting note.

The second movement, Allegretto piacevole, provides an animated contrast while maintaining the same emotional core. Its mood and rhythm is more animated, with a gently lilting character. A pianist friend of mine remarked that the semiquaver figures in this movement suggest the composer cycling around the countryside of Malvern where he lived. Yet even in its lighter moments, there is an underlying poignancy. The coda returns to the theme of the first movement, back in g minor now, but once again the music ends in G major, fading into a ppp whisper.

While not especially technically challenging for the pianist (I would say this piece is around Grade 6 to 7 standard), the piece requires sensitivity of touch and competent legato pedalling in the first movement to sustain the cantabile melody. And while the first movement remains in a mostly hushed dynamic range, there is plenty of scope for expressivity.

I recently played this piece for a friend who owns a beautiful Steinway B. Having not touched the music for nearly 10 years, I was reminded of just how charming this pair of miniatures is. The score is published by Faber Music.

Here’s another atmospheric solo piano piece by Elgar:

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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