An Elgar Archive for Manchester, Built by Two Devoted Americans

A new Elgar archive opened this week at Manchester's Hallé Orchestra, anchored by the collection of Arthur Reynolds, the American collector who spent a lifetime amassing every scrap of Elgariana he could find.

Reynolds assembled a formidable array of unpublished letters, unreleased recordings and related material — including Elgar's monogrammed shaving bowl. A month or so before the archive's opening, at their last lunch together, Reynolds was busy handing his collection over to its new Manchester home.

The archive stands partly as a monument to two Americans who believed the English had failed their greatest composer. Both Reynolds and the biographer Jerrold Northrop Moore shared the conviction that the English took Elgar for granted — what the writer calls "a dereliction they were determined to remedy."

Moore published the definitive biography, Elgar: A Creative Life, in the early 1980s, when he was in his 50s. He dedicated the greater part of his life to tracing the composer's living acquaintances and tracking down his documents. He was no one-eyed obsessive: he had a huge range of interests beyond Elgar and, behind a certain shyness, an immense personal charm.

It was through Moore that the author met Reynolds, another American with a lifelong passion for Elgar and his world. Reynolds, too, was vastly cultured, curious and unfailingly good company.

Together, the two men's work — one in biography and document-hunting, the other in collecting — now has a permanent institutional home at the Hallé, the orchestra with perhaps the deepest historical ties to Elgar's music.

The archive is, in the author's verdict, "definitely worth a visit." For scholars and admirers of Elgar, Manchester has just become an essential destination.