Jerrold Northrop Moore, eccentric Elgar biographer who called his Pekingese Sir Edward – obituary
Jerrold Northrop Moore, who has died aged 90, was an American academic who devoted much of his career to the British composer Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1934), sweeping up the biographical facts in the illuminating Elgar: A Creative Life (1984) and fanning them out again in five volumes of carefully annotated correspondence.
Some dismissed Moore as an eccentric. He kept a set of Elgar’s china, cultivated plants from the composer’s garden and was followed around by a testy Pekingese named Sir Edward. His supporters, however, argued that he had a preternatural insight into the composer’s psyche.
His earliest publications included Elgar: A Life in Photographs (1972), vividly evoking the composer’s life and times in more than 100 pages. Elgar on Record (1974) was a comprehensive account of the composer’s 20-year involvement with gramophone recording and included vivid recollections culled by Moore from those who worked with him.
Writing in The Sunday Telegraph in 1991, Moore revealed the pianist Joseph Cooper’s theory that the hidden melody to Elgar’s Enigma Variations, a subject that had long baffled musicologists, came from the slow movement of Mozart’s Prague Symphony. “This is the only ‘solution’ I have ever come across that seems to ring all the right bells,” he concluded.
Moore’s interests spilled into books about other English artistic figures of the mid-20th century including the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and the illustrator FL Griggs. He also published letters by Elgar, Gustav Holst, Yehudi Menuhin and others to the conductor Sir Adrian Boult, whom he described in a 90th birthday tribute as “a symbol of our civilisation”.
In A Voice in Time (1976) he told how in 1902 Fred Gaisberg, a pioneer of the recording industry, persuaded Enrico Caruso to commit ten songs to disc. However, the Italian tenor’s demand for a fee of £100 was rejected by Gaisberg’s paymasters in London, who telegraphed: “Exorbitant; forbid you to record.” Fortunately for posterity, Gaisberg ignored them.
Jerrold Northrop Moore was born in Paterson, New Jersey, on March 1 1934; his American roots would later prompt his book Confederate Commissary General (1996), a study of food supply lines during the American Civil War. He played the organ, studied English literature at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, and did his PhD at Yale University.
He first visited Britain for the 1954 Edinburgh and Three Choirs festivals, making the acquaintance of Elgar’s daughter, Carice. On his next visit in 1959 Carice facilitated introductions to many of those who had known her father including the musical sisters Beatrice and Margaret Harrison, Sir Percy Hull, the dedicatee of the 5th Pomp and Circumstance March, and Dora Powell (née Penny), the Dorabella of the 10th Enigma Variation; these meetings were recounted in Friends of the Friends (2023).
Back in the US, Moore taught at the University of Rochester and returned to Yale as curator of historical sound recordings. In 1970 he settled inBritain, where in addition to his Elgar pursuits he wrote for Gramophone magazine and began using his middle name to avoid confusion with the accompanist Gerald Moore. In 1992 he was awarded the Elgar Society medal.
In the elegant and affectionate Elgar: Child of Dreams (2004), Moore emphasised the role of the English countryside in the composer’s art and especially his love of walking and cycling, relating the steady rhythm of these outdoor pursuits to the 72-beats-per-minute tempo so often found in his music.
He also reminded the reader that on his deathbed Elgar turned to a friend and feebly whistled a phrase from his Cello Concerto, saying: “If ever you’re walking on the Malvern Hill and hear that, don’t be frightened. It’s only me.”
Moore is survived by a brother and two nephews.
Jerrold Northrop Moore, born March 1 1934, died May 18 2024
