WHILE EDWARD ELGAR'S song-cycle Sea Pictures (1899) has been popular with audiences since its premiere, critics have remained less than impressed by the composition. Commentators have analysed Sea Pictures as a set of stand-alone miniatures, deemed it inferior to the composer's other works due to the poetry Elgar chose to set, and even argued that it is cyclical only in a literary sense because (purportedly) the five songs lack a compelling sense of musical unity. Most of the comments within the secondary literature can be summed up by the terse statement within J. P. E. Harper-Scott's Elgar: An Extraordinary Life: ‘Sea Pictures, Op. 37, has a hotch-potch jumble of five poems, one of the best of them by [the composer's wife] Alice Elgar (a memory of a trip to Capri, set in 1897 as “Love alone will stay”). One of the songs, “Sabbath Morning at Sea”, is made of old music from 1883; it is the weakest of the set.’ Harper-Scott, like most of the biographers who have come before him, notes that there were five songs in the cycle (each one featuring a text by a different poet), and presents little else aside from who sang the premiere (Clara Butt) and where it took place (the Norfolk and Norwich Musical Festival). Within most biographies of the composer, Sea Pictures is worth little else.

Yet those who present the two most detailed musical analyses of the work, Stephen Banfield and Trevor Hold, find Sea Pictures’ combination of imagery and music not only compelling, but better than most of Elgar's other efforts in the genre of song. Hold, after castigating Elgar as a songwriter (for being ‘content to accept the artistically [sic] meretriciousness of the popular ballad format’ and for his lack of fastidiousness in word setting), admits that within Sea Pictures ‘the real Elgar peeps through and we have real music’. Banfield believes Sea Pictures is successful because it ultimately ‘amalgamates the two strongly contrasted aspects of Elgar's personality, the outer love of invigorating, sometimes vulgar spectacle and bombast … and the inner, private hypersensitivity to emotional influence, in this case personal nostalgia’.

As Edward Elgar's compositions for imperial ceremonies and the First World War have specific functions (royal celebrations, marching music, rallying cries, and charitable offerings), they can be considered together within an analysis. The compositions share a number of characteristics: none is abstract in nature, Elgar composed many of them to sound specifically ‘popular’, and none can claim ‘secret’ or ‘hidden’ meanings, like the ‘Enigma’ Variations or the Violin Concerto. In the period before the war, these compositions solidified Elgar's reputation as an important national figure. During the war, they aptly represented the complex difficulties individual Britons faced from the violence and carnage of battle. After the war, they placed Elgar in the forefront of society as an official ceremonial figure. They allowed him to represent a musical tradition rapidly declining throughout elite Great Britain, but prominent in middle-class quarters. These works were inspirational in their own time, and many are still rousing today. As important examples of period pieces, they show Elgar transcending the limits of concert music to successfully negotiate popular forms.

Throughout this chapter, ‘popular’ describes music that might be easily disseminated, might be performed in non-elite contexts and venues (bandstands, rallies, music-halls, the London Coliseum, etc.), or might have been written by Elgar to garner a broad audience. A close analogy to this type of composition would be Beethoven's Wellingtons Sieg (or ‘Battle Symphony’), a potboiler meant to capture timely sentiment. Elgar often designed his ‘functional’ music to be popular through concentrating on broad styles of composition, including singable melody as opposed to motivic transformation.