Abstract
The English composer Edward Elgar (1857-1934) was already recognized as an important figure during his lifetime. Several studies have indicated, however, that he had been neglected in the 1920s. The purpose of this study is to clarify how Elgar has been positioned in the cultural history of music by perusing discourses on him produced between 1920 and 1934. In particular, this paper focuses on those discourses that appeared in The Musical Times, a music magazine published by Novello. The discourses in The Musical Times can be divided into two types. In the first type, Elgar was seen as a national composer of England because of his fame at home and abroad. In the second type, he was seen as a universalistic composer because he composed works to express his own personality without using elements of folksongs. In conclusion, from these discourses, we can see that Elgar was positioned as both national and universal, a rare position among composers in the cultural history of English music.
