🎀 Cute Composer Series: World Cancer Support Month — The Same Disease, Two Eras 🎗️✨🎶 Edward Elgar (1857–1934) was the most celebrated British composer of his age — the man who gave England its musical identity with the Enigma Variations, The Dream of Gerontius, and the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, whose first march became Land of Hope and Glory 🇬🇧🎼 After his wife Alice died in 1920, Elgar largely stopped composing, conducting instead and recording his own works. In his last years the BBC commissioned a Third Symphony, and a publisher encouraged an opera. In October 1933, surgeons operating on sciatic pain discovered inoperable colorectal cancer 💔 He was told. He was calm. He told his doctor: "I believe there is nothing but complete oblivion." He left both the symphony and the opera unfinished. He died February 23, 1934, aged 76 — asking to be buried near the hills where he walked as a boy, not in a London ceremony 🌿 His Third Symphony, completed from his sketches by Anthony Payne in 1997, had its premiere 63 years after Elgar's death. Jules Massenet (1842–1912) was the most successful French opera composer of his era — author of over 30 operas including the beloved Manon and Werther, teacher of Charpentier, Chausson, and Reynaldo Hahn at the Paris Conservatoire, winner of the Prix de Rome 🎭✨ In 1910 he began to notice his health deteriorating. He was admitted to hospital under a pseudonym for abdominal cancer surgery and spent two weeks recovering. He told friends he was suffering a "cruel illness." He composed all the way through — producing opera after opera, his productivity unbroken even as his body failed 🎶 He died in August 1912, aged 70, with his wife and family at his side. His musical style had already fallen somewhat out of fashion by then, but his Méditation from Thaïs — one of the most beautiful pieces ever written for violin and orchestra — has never left the repertoire 🎻 👉 Which one's music do you want to explore more? VOTE BELOW👇& follow @daixcompose for more Cute Composer spotlights 💙 Recordings: 🎶 Elgar: Enigma Variations — DuPage Symphony Orchestra https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG_oqXdPWhg 🎶 Massenet: Méditation from Thaïs — Violin: Nicola Benedetti; Piano: Julien Quentin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HXv-Ymj7r0
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