The story of Elgar's In the South (Alassio)

By 1903, Edward Elgar was doing well enough to afford a winter holiday for his wife and himself. They went to fashionable Alassio on the Italian Riviera and walked in the hills enjoying streams and flowers against a backdrop both of snow-capped mountains and the blue Mediterranean.

He daydreamed of ancient civilisations and mused on the passage of time as he watched shepherds amongst the ruins. ‘Then I woke up,’ he said, ‘and found I’d composed an overture. The rest was merely writing it down.’ In the South (Alassio) was premiered in 1904 at Covent Garden.

It was a good year for Elgar. The King Knighted him, the Athenaeum accepted him and Birmingham University honoured him. A winter in the warm south was his due, dammit.