With such legendary films for television and cinema as Elgar, Delius: Song of Summer, Mahler and Lisztomania, Ken Russell long ago blew apart the notion that composers were as solemn in their private lives as in their music. In these new novel-biographies he goes a step further: reinventing the quintessentially English Edward Elgar (1857—1934) and Frederick Delius (1862—1934) for the printed page with his customary imagination, wit and irreverence.

Here the two musicians — both provincial lads — come alive in a new way in biographical novels that are revealing yet boisterously entertaining — occasionally outrageous and iconoclastic.

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When he died in 1934 Edward Elgar had become a National Institution, but his musical career was long over. This fictional memoir, supposedly written in 1934, takes us back to the years before 1914 when the composer's reputation was at its peak.

It tells the story of two young men who went to Hereford as pupils of George Sinclair, the cathedral organist and one of the friends immortalised by Elgar in the 'Enigma Variations'. They find that the composer, ill at ease in the circles to which his socially ambitious wife aspires, enjoys relaxing in the company of young people.

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