Elgar: The Man Behind the Mask

'Three excellent films – we’re watching as well as listening – on British composers by the documentary film-maker John Bridcut, made about a decade ago, have been issued on DVD: Elgar, The Man Behind the Mask; The Pleasures of Delius; and The Passions of Vaughan Williams.

'Bridcut, who made last year’s BBC Four documentary Jonas Kaufmann: Tenor for the Ages, has a talent for telling personal stories: Elgar’s love of the woman he called “Windflower” and his insistence on having a “death bed” photo while he was in fact still alive to mastermind it; Delius’s strange marriage and taste for all things “exotic”, with all that the word implies; Vaughan Williams and the complexities of falling madly in love with Ursula, nearly 40 years younger and equally, if not more, smitten.

'Yet Bridcut’s primary gift is to bring the music of these composers alive, weaving archive footage with specially filmed performance and deft contributions from a handful of musicians well able to knock down all the myths and prejudices. These commentators are passionate as well as scholarly, among them the composer and Elgar authority Anthony Payne, the conductor Mark Elder, who puts as powerful a case for Delius as you’ll find, as well as the late Michael Kennedy and Richard Hickox and, from the archive,Thomas Beecham. Ursula Vaughan Williams, shortly before her death aged 96 in 2007 after half a century of widowhood, recalls the taxi ride in which RVW first kissed her, in 1938, as if it were yesterday. These invaluable films make you rethink the music. They are, too, engrossing to watch.'

'Bridcut's pundits listen and emote.  We watch them listening.  This is supposed to be death to a documentary, but it works.  After all, we are listening too, and when Bridcut's subjects speak over the recordings, they do so sparely, spontaneously and in response to the music.  These scenes alone make this an extremely moving documentary, a genuine work of art in itself.  But more than this, Bridcut succeeds in having us hear both the known and unknown works as if for the first time, which, with such emblematic scores as Elgar’s, is a considerable achievement.'

'John Bridcut's sensitive, absorbing film reveals startling details and new colours in an old master restored' 

'Bridcut’s own documentary is more than a worthy successor to [Ken] Russell’s: it is a stunning example of the genre, made with self-evident affection for, and insight into, its subject. It is also superbly accomplished from a technical point of view, and altogether revelatory as to Elgar the man and his music.  […]  All in all this is a wonderful documentary. It is beautifully shot and directed, and it deepens our understanding of a composer whose significance Ken Russell re-alerted us to back in the Sixties. At the end of Bridcut’s film he pays a nice hommage to his predecessor, with an image of Elgar, atop a white pony, ascending a Worcestershire hillside.'

'Following his magnificent 2004 documentary Britten’s Children, the director John Bridcut has again assembled the great and the good to make this revelatory film about Edward Elgar.'

'Where is the real Elgar to be found – in his boisterous self-portrait at the end of the Enigma Variations, the warm, feminine sentiment of the Violin Concerto and the First Symphony’s Adagio, or the nightmares of the Second Symphony? No doubt in each of them, and more. John Bridcut’s painfully sensitive documentary hones in on the private, introspective Elgar, the dark knight of "ghosts and shadows", always with the music to the fore. And by getting the good and great, young and old of the musical world not just to talk but to react to the works as they hear them, he may have broken new ground.