Britain’s music press marked the 2007 sesquicentenary of Sir Edward Elgar’s birth with a veritable orgy of remembrance, for which no previous event—certainly not the muted commemorations of Vaughan Williams’s centenary in 1972 or of Henry Purcell’s tercentenary in 1995—had prepared anyone. In England, at least, revering Elgar now seems as fashionable as reviling him once was, although the BBC chose to indulge in typical self-contradictory raving about “imperialistic doggerel” and “antediluvian Little Englishness.” Transcending such jabber are the two new books under review, though only one can be cordially recommended.

Elgar: An Extraordinary Life is the strangest musicological book since the late Ian McDonald released, in 1991, his New Shostakovich. J. P. E. Harper-Scott, a London academic, rather resembles a brilliant undergraduate who, having mislaid all his notes en routeto his tutorial presentation, improvises with staggering ease about not merely the topic at hand but also every book, play, film, or television program that has come into his purview. Discounting the index and some poorly reproduced pictures, we have here 150 pages in search of an editor. One double-page spread selected at random discourses upon train-travel, a hot water bottle, an aborted string quartet, Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle stories, singing lessons undertaken by the composer’s daughter, the death of the composer’s brother-in-law, the composer’s resignation from his University of Birmingham professorship, and a white Angora rabbit. This is positively a model of Hemingwayan curtness compared to the superabundant footnotes, where Harper-Scott surveys Tolkien, C. S. Lewis,