The enigma I will not explain – its "dark saying" must be left unguess — Edward Elgar

"My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us, the world is full of it and you simply take as much as you require."

"The aggressive Edwardian prosperity that lends so comfortable a background to Elgars finales is now as strange to us as the England that produced Greensleeves and The Woodes so wilde. Stranger, in fact, and less sympathetic. In consequence much of Elgars music, through no fault of its own, has for the present generation an almost intolerable air of smugness, self-assurance and autocratic benevolence."

"I always said God was against art and I still believe it. Anything obscene or trivial is blessed in this world and has a reward – I ask for no reward – only to live & to hear my work."

"Play it like something you hear down by the river."

"People who talk of the spread of music in England and the increasing love of it, rarely seem to know where the growth of the art is really strong and properly fostered: some day the press will awake to the fact, already known abroad and to some few of us in England, that the living centre of music in Great Britain is not London, but somewhere further North."

"His range is so Handelian that he can give the people a universal melody or march with as sure a hand as he can give the Philharmonic Society a symphonic adagio, such as has not been given since Beethoven died."