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Elgar: Enigma Variations
To 19th-century Germans, England was famously “the land without music.” There had been no British composers of distinction for 200 years. So, when suddenly and unexpectedly an obscure provincial musician named Edward Elgar brought forth a strange orchestral piece— a set of variations on an unknown theme in which each movement was a portrait of one of his friends—it was a matter for astonishment, an enigma indeed. “Here,” declared one critic, “is a man who knows what he wants to say and knows how to say it!”
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