Excellent, Without a doubt!!

An Exercise In Nonsense

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

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.

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.

A wonderfully evocative film which remains vivid to this writer even though I have not seen this TV production for many years. At the time it set a standard for sympathetic dramatisation of the lives of musical icons. This work is light years away from Ken Russell's later excursions into cinematic pyrotechnics and excesses, but the roots of that curiosity about musical genius is clear in "Elgar".If you have seen "Hilary and Jackie", you will want to see this moving film that tells the story of the composer of the piece of music that Jacqueline Du Pre will always be associated with: Elgar's Cello Concerto.