I seldom attended the festivals of the Three Choirs. They rarely yielded music of an “epoch- making” character, and they always occurred at the beginning of September, just when I was enjoying my hard-earned holiday. I was warned, however, not to miss the Worcester Festival of 1896; and I am glad I did not. That was the meeting which lifted Edward Elgar out of his obscurity as a Malvern teacher and revealed him to his countrymen as a musician of high attainments and still higher promise. For once the “local man" turned out to be something better than your ordinary writer of “Kapellmeistermusik”; for once the dip in the local lottery-bag yielded a genuine prize.

Edward Elgar produced at this festival a short oratorio entitled “The Light of Life”, founded upon the miracle of the healing of the blind man, related in the ninth chapter of St. John. Its originality, the sense of proportion and tone-color displayed in the choral and orchestral effects, the bold and masterful treatment of the leading themes, and the generally engrossing character of the music fairly took connoisseurs by surprise, and prepared them for the development which so rapidly placed Edward Elgar in the very forefront of contemporary British composers.