Appeal launched for funds to save the Elgar Birthplace Museum

The Times, 26/11/11
By Simon Tait

Edward Elgar stretches his legs before him on the garden bench, his favourite pipe in his left hand, as he gazes over the Malvern Hills, “my beloved country”, that were his inspiration.

The garden belongs to the small cottage at Lower Broadheath, three miles from Worcester, where the composer was born in 1857, and though he only spent his first two years here he returned throughout his life. He wrote his first music as a teenager at the neighbouring farm where he and his siblings spent their summers.

But although the bronze by Jemma Pearson was commissioned in 2007 by the Elgar Foundation to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, this small but respectable rural cottage has become more than a memorial to one of England’s greatest composers. It has developed into the primary source for studying the work as well as the life of the man whose music was seen to mirror the British character in the tumultuous first half of the 20th century.

Now, running a regular annual deficit and receiving no subsidy, the museum needs to avoid closure and on November 23 an appeal for £1m over three years is launched by the conductor Sir Mark Elder who is president of the Elgar Foundation, the charitable trust that owns the museum. “Only at the Elgar Birthplace Museum can you get close to Elgar, feel his presence and understand his work,” Elder said. “The museum’s existence as a centre of excellence for Elgar’s life and work is vital to the international world of music.”

The son of a piano tuner who later had a music shop in Worcester High Street, Elgar was the fourth in a family of seven children. Self-taught, his career began a gradual upward trajectory almost from the day he married his muse, Alice, at the age of 32. Recognition did not come for another ten years with the premiere of The Enigma Variations in 1899, and all his greatest works came in the next 20 years with Alice dying in 1920. By then he had world renown, was the confidant of royalty, and he eventually accrued four knighthoods, including “The 1st Baronetcy of Broadheath” as he styled himself.

When he died at home in Worcester in 1934 Elgar asked his daughter, Carice Elgar Blake, to create a memorial in the Broadheath cottage, then and now owned by the local authority. She endowed with many of Elgar’s own manuscripts, music, letters, recordings and photographs which over the years have been added to by purchases and gifts.

It opened in 1935 and no attempt was made to recreate the house as the toddler might have known it, there was no record. Instead, the house tells Elgar’s story through his own objects – his desk, his pens in the pen holder he made himself, a gramophone (“The gramophone… can bring into being a new public which shall understand music by playing great compositions adequately recorded” he prophesied, slightly pompously, in 1921), his pipes, his books. He was enthusiastic about his hobbies, golf, cycling, travel, scientific experiment – he invented a soap in his laboratory – and crossword puzzles.

In 2000 a new visitor centre was built to the north to ease the pressure on the cottage, controversially because it was seen as architecturally inharmonious. At its centre is a changing display taken from the large archive which tells of Elgar’s early life, the violin he played in local orchestras, the bassoon he played in his own wind quintet. His annotated music manuscripts are here as well as some of the wealth of correspondence, and his honours and decorations. Also in the centre is a shop, a room for meetings and small concerts, office space rented by the local authority which is now going through a cost-cutting exercise.

But with only a steady 10,000 annuals and miserly public transport services which mean a visit requires a car journey, the Elgar Birthplace Museum needs to expand its operation to survive, believes its director Catherine Sloan.

“We need to broaden its appeal by looking more widely at the social history surrounding Elgar,” she said. “We can’t look at this music in the context of the Great War, for instance. He loved the Malverns, but we forget there were quarries with explosions going off all the time and dust pollution which would have affected him. We ought to be able to look at what Worcester was like when he was growing up.”

Already, with funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Foundation for Sport and the Arts, there is to be a recasting of the visitor centre with more interactive displays and a café, and the delicate paper collections – including 10,000 letters and 200 original manuscripts – have been digitised to make access easier, but to expand further the museum needs to establish an endowment.

Secure storage capacity has to be enhanced, and an adjacent building is to become a new exhibition space. The museum wants to strengthen its acquisitions fund, and while it earns only a third of its costs from admissions, ticket costs need to be kept to a minimum if access is to be widened. Outreach and education programmes also need to be developed.

“Elgar wanted his music to be for the people,” Catherine Sloan said, “and we need safeguard our future if we are to make that dream come true.”