Music of Wartime When war broke out on 4 August 1914, the Elgars were on the west coast of Scotland. He had almost agreed to compose the last part of his oratorio trilogy, and was taking a long holiday before starting work. When he returned home he put that idea aside, and within weeks was sworn in as a special constable.

His first musical reaction was to compose on 6 September a ‘Soldier's Song: The Roll Call’, which Clara Butt sang on 10 October 1914. But he must later have found this an inappropriate response, and withdrew it. Then, as Belgium was overrun, Elgar was invited to contribute to a fund-raising anthology by leading artists, musicians, and writers. In The Observer he found a poem (Après Anvers) by the Belgian Emile Cammaerts (1878–1953), translated by his wife Tita Brand Cammaerts, the daughter of Marie Brema, the first Angel in Gerontius. He composed it as Carillon, Op. 75, in memory of the ruined bell towers of Flanders. At Rosa Burley's suggestion, he did not set the words to music, but composed a prelude and brief entr’actes between the recited verses. The four-note bell ostinato rings out from tonic down to dominant against an upward-thrusting three-in-a-bar figure, making an effective tug of rhythmic war. To ‘cover the graves of our children’, as the dying leaves scent the autumn air, Elgar tenderly begins his carillon figure in the treble on the mediant and augments it; then inverts it against the original to usher in the hoped-for triumphant entry into Berlin – to ‘sing of hope and fiercest hate … and charity’.

Carillon was performed at the Queen's Hall on 7 December by Tita Brand (and was later taken up by Rejane). At that threatening moment it incited tremendous enthusiasm. Thomas Dunhill recalled a ‘poignant and unforgettable experience’.