Edward Elgar lived on another ten years without composing anything of much significance. He did however make recordings of his own music whose value as historic and artistic documents justified his friends’ encouragement in the face of his own gloomy predictions.
From time to time in that final decade he would look out his notes and sketches for various projects – principally a piano concerto, an opera and a third symphony. Late in 1932 the BBC, largely at Bernard Shaw’s urging, commissioned the symphony for £1000. Throughout the following year there were brief flickers of the creative flame interspersed with such distractions as the heady pleasure of at last becoming an aeronaut. At the end of May he flew to France to conduct the Paris première of his Violin Concerto with Yehudi Menuhin, combining this trip with a visit to the dying Delius at Grez-sur-Loing. Back in England he tried again with the symphony, which was progressing but feebly. The first signs of his own cancer appeared although at the time he was more anguished by a disease increasingly evident in Europe. He had already written to Frank Schuster’s sister Adela:
I am in a maze regarding events in Germany – what are they doing? In this morning’s paper it is said that the greatest conductor Bruno Walter &, stranger still, Einstein are ostracised: are we all mad? The Jews have always been my best and kindest friends – the pain of these news is unbearable & I do not know what it really means.
He died in February 1934, working on his symphony until the last. On that very day the Hildebrand, which had been sold to a man in Monmouthshire for £11,000, was being broken up. The ship had been built in 1911, the year of Elgar’s Second Symphony and arguably the high summer of his output. Thus by a strange coincidence its lifespan happened precisely to encompass the declining years of the Amazon cruises as well as of the creative and calendrical life of Sir Edward Elgar.