Thank you for the music

Many composers, even Elgar and Liszt, owe their popularity to groups of devotees who were determined their music should continue to be heard. Claire Jackson reports

- Claire Jackson

THE walls of Rose Cholmondeley’s Kensington apartment are decorated with curious musical memorabilia. Portraits of a young man gaze down upon a grand piano, observing the musician’s practice. There can be no doubt about the topic of conversation: Frédéric Chopin is a lifelong passion of pianist Lady Rose, president and co-chair of the Chopin Society.

It was almost an inevitable love affair. Lady Rose is a descendant of Charlotte de Rothschild, a favorite pupil of Chopin’s and the dedicatee of the Fourth Ballade and the Waltz in C-sharp Minor. The young Lady Rose didn’t play much of the repertoire herself until she began lessons in Paris with Louis Kentner, a former president of the Chopin Society. She joined in 1983.

Most of Britain’s composer societies were conceived pre-internet when finding like-minded individuals required more than a chatroom or hashtag. Then, as now, they offered a chance to discover more about a particular oeuvre of music, but they often had a more altruistic objective, too.

When Elgar died in 1934, his music quickly fell from favor. ‘It was felt that Elgar’s sound represented the Imperial past—something that has since been debunked,’ explains Andrew Neill, a former chairman of the Elgar Society, set up in 1951 by conductor Adrian Boult to reinstate Elgar’s music.