Edwardian Era
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Edwardian Era’
A gifted composer of classical music in the romantic tradition, admired by Stanford, Elgar, and Sullivan.
Daniel Taylor, a medical doctor who was later a coroner and magistrate in the Gambia, had a brief affair with an unmarried woman in London named Alice Martin. The result was a boy she named Samuel Coleridge Taylor, after the famous poet (it was Samuel who hyphenated it as Coleridge-Taylor).
Edward Elgar suffered from depression, and ‘Nimrod’ is his token of thanks to the true friend who supported him through it.
By far the best-known of all Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’ is ‘Nimrod’, frequently played at Remembrance services and funerals. But the story behind it suggests that it was intended as music not of loss or parting, but of enduring friendship, and new hope.